Claudio Canaparo

Claudio Canaparo
Born (1962-10-07) 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 is a 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.

Education and 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) in 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.

In 2012 he started to supervise and teach within the postgraduate program from the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and from Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, both in Argentina. In the same year he developed a project of teaching basic philosophy to 8–10 years old children from ‘Arc-en-Ciel’ public school of Feugarolles in France. In 2014 he started to work within a multinational team of researchers and ONGs in a multidisciplinary project about climate change in relation with colonialism and geo-epistemology. In 2015 he started also to teach philosophy at the Lycée Stendhal (Aiguillon) and at the Lycée George Sand (Nérac), both in France.

The principal effort of his work goes to establish the relation between knowledge and conceptual evolution, mainly focused on theories and related concepts about space with peripheral areas of the planet or, more precisely, has having the peripheral spaces of the planet as main intellectual frame. Themes of his works include also 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’, ‘El mundo Ingaramo’), and science and writing (‘Ciencia y escritura’).

2000s-2005s work

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 an alternative notion of space considered as the main speculative stand point. As part of this general approach Canaparo developed a number of aspects such as [1] the relation between science and writing, [2] the construction of the concept of authorship, [3] and the re-configuration of some concepts of the history of European philosophy. [4] 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 [5].

2006s-2010s work

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 formulation 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.

2011-2015 work

As a natural consequence of these previous works, in 2011, started a project aimed to explore the relation between climate change and colonialism. And as result of this experience wrote a book entitled ‘El pensamiento basura’ (The rubbish thinking), to be published soon. In 2014, after several years of attempts, started another project, which explore the relation between war and epistemology, in particular related to the Argentinian civil war at the end of the Twentieth Century and mainly focused in theoretical and conceptual evolution.

Personal life

In 2012, after been successively leaving in Rimini, Bologna, London, Exeter and Brussels, he moved to the countryside in South of France, where started to rebuild a XII Century property together with his partner and their three daughters. In March 2013 at the local French pool he postulated as candidate to the commune’s Council of the nearest village of Feugarolles, where was elected.

Select Bibliography

(i) Books

(ii) Articles/ Chapters in books

(iii) Articles in journals

References

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