Claudio Canaparo

Claudio Canaparo
Born 7 October 1962
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Contemporary philosophy
School Latin American thinking Continental philosophy
Main interests
 Radical constructivism · Piaget’s theories · Humberto Maturana’s works · History of Concepts · Sociology of Culture

Claudio Canaparo Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College in London. He has written as a literary critic, epistemologist, sociology of culture analyst and philosopher.

Career

Canaparo was born in the city port of Campana, Argentina, to a mother of Hebrew origins and an Italian rooted father; he was a traveller, manual worker and scientific researcher before entering academia. He studied at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Rosario, at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) at Buenos Aires, at the DAMS delle arti, della musica e dello spettacolo) at the Università degli Studi di Bologna, and received his Ph.D. under the supervision of William Rowe at King's College London in 2000.

Prevented from working in Europe as a philosopher or social scientist, he developed most of his projects in academia as a “Latin American specialist”. He joined the Faculty of Arts at Exeter University in 1995 where in 2004 he created the Centre for Latin American Studies. In 2009 he was appointed Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College. He is also Associated Researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. Themes of his works include sociology of knowledge (Muerte y transfiguración de la cultura rioplatense), epistemology and colonialism (Geo-Epistemology, El imaginario patagonia), authorship theory (The Manufacture of an Author), and science and writing (Ciencia y escritura).

Major Works

Canaparo's work in Geo-Epistemology focuses on the development of a perspective named “reversal thinking” which tries to analyze the evolution of ideas and concepts in relation with a notion of an alternative concept of space as the main speculative stand point.

As part of this general approach Canaparo developed a number of aspects such as the relation between science and writing, [1] the construction of the concept of authorship, [2] and the re-configuration of some concepts of the history of European philosophy. [3] But the major work in this context is constituted by an analysis of a leading case of the cultural and conceptual evolution of space, in which space is considered as the most accurate speculative approach to the situation and development of knowledge in peripheral areas [4] .

Lately his work has evolved towards an analysis of the relationship between epistemology and colonialism from the conceptual and technical point of view. Under this context he developed a tetralogy about Latin America, which concentrates in the conceptual consequences of language, knowledge, colonialism and what he calls post-territoriality. Also this work develops the idea of a second degree of colonialism, which refers to a number of objects, domains and concepts -highly productive in terms of knowledge and understanding- where colonialism is not usually analysed. The first volume of these analyses on contemporary colonialism within peripheral places, from the point of view of knowledge and Diaspora, is entitled Viaje en Egipto. La formulación espacial del colonialismo y sus consecuencias [Travel within Egypt. The spatial formulation of colonialism and its consequences]. The second volume, entitled El pensamiento del ojo en las colonias. La formulación espacial del colonialismo y sus visiones [The eye’s thought. The spatial formulation of colonialism and its visions], focus on visual perception and visual developments as a way of dominant cogito in peripheral areas. The third volume, entitled El autor periférico. La formulación espacial del colonialismo y sus identidades [The peripheral author. The spatial of colonialism and its identities], focus on the constitution of a parallel phenomenon: the constitution of the notion of self and the constitution of a narrative entity usually called authorship. Finally, the fourth volume, entitled La negociación del espacio y los sentimientos bajo el colonialism [The negotiation of space and feelings under the colonialism], focus on the way the constitution of a sentimental life within individuals in peripheral areas of the planet is dominated by technological set-ups referred to number a activities, from writing to learning, and from eating to building houses.

Select Bibliography

(i) Books

(ii) Articles/ Chapters in books

(iii) Articles in journals

References

External links