AUTHORS
Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes is a retired professor from the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo-USP. She started her academic life at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul-UFRGS, where she graduated in Philosophy in 1962. As a student, she took part in the student movement, having been part of the Catholic University Youth-JUC and Ação Popular-AP, when she met Paulo Eduardo Arantes, a Physics student at the University of São Paulo at the time, with whom she would later marry. In 1963, she was hired as Advisor to the Secretary of Culture of Rio Grande do Sul, focusing on Popular Culture. At the end of that year, having received a scholarship, she went to Paris where she obtained a Certificat d’Études Supérieurs en Esthétique from the Sorbonne. While there, as a student-listener she attended several courses in the History of Philosophy and General Philosophy at the University of Paris. After returning to Brazil a year following the 1964 coup, she saw his family forced into exile in Chile after his father, Ernani Maria Fiori, a distinguished professor of Philosophy at UFRGS, was purged by the new regime and, shortly afterwards from University of Brasília-UnB, again due to the dictatorship. In 1966, Otília married Paulo Arantes and moved to São Paulo. At the Philosophy Department at USP, she attended graduate school and defended his master's thesis on art criticism in Baudelaire in 1968 under the supervision of Dr. Gilda de Mello e Souza. From 1966 to 1969, Otília taught classes in Social Sciences and Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-SP), having participated intensively in the movement for equal representation in collegiate bodies of the University and for the reformulation of curricula in 1968. A year later, thanks to an agreement between USP's Philosophy Department and the French Government, Paulo and Otília left for Paris to prepare their doctorates. Otília defended her thesis, again on Baudelaire, at the beginning of 1973 at the University of Paris I, where she was supervised by Dr Bernard Teyssèdre. A few months later, after Paulo had also defended his thesis, they returned to Brazil and to the Philosophy Department at USP, where Otília was hired as a professor in the discipline of Aesthetics. In the years she taught in USP, she, together with his supervisees, also created and directed the Contemporary Art Studies Center - CEAC between 1979 and 1992. In addition to research, and organizating debates and courses on contemporary Brazilian art, she published eight issues of Arte em Revista. During this period, Otília gathered, prefaced and published Mário Pedrosa's original art critic texts in four volumes. Mário Pedrosa was also the subject of a book by Otília, published in 1991 on the ten year anniversary of the critic's death. Throughout the 1980s, Otília was a guest professor in undergraduate and graduate courses at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP. Since 1981, she was Researcher 1A (maximum level) in the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development-CNPq for 25 years. Her research themes, books, articles and conferences in the area of Aesthetics, initially focused on the Plastic Arts and Art Criticism, later moved to more regularly focus on Architecture and Urbanism, with a critical review of the Modern Movement and the new architectural trends, as well as new urban policies and strategies. Over the past ten years, her work emphasized extreme urban forms, starting with China, to which she dedicated her latest book, Chai-na.
Paulo Eduardo Arantes is a retired professor from the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo-USP. Since 1980, he has been a Researcher 1A (maximum level) at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development-CNPq. He joined USP for the first time in 1962, taking his first year of physics at the then Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters. In the following year, he closed his enrollment to took part full time in the Student Movement, as a member of the national directorate of Catholic University Youth (JUC), moving to live in Rio de Janeiro until mid-1964. After returning to São Paulo, he enrolled in a Philosophy course, from which he graduated in 1967. In the previous year, he married Otília Fiori, whom he had met in the student movement in 1963. After completing the course, Paulo Arantes became a professor in the Philosophy Department, directing seminars in the disciplines of Logic and Contemporary Philosophy in his first two years of teaching. In October of 1969, with a grant from the French Government and aid from FAPESP, Paulo and Otília left for Paris to pursue their doctorates. Supervised by Dr Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Paulo defended his thesis on the problem of time in the work of Hegel at the University of Paris, Nanterre campus in June of 1973. Resuming his post in the Department of Philosophy in August of that same year, he remained there until his retirement in 1998. During this period, he was Coordinator of Graduate Studies for two years and Director of the Journal, Discurso from 1976 to 1981. After retirement, although continuing his thesis and research supervising, Paulo gradually took on new tasks at the intersection of intellectual and political life. A first initiative was the creation of the Zero à Esquerda collection, conceived as a broad cultural front opposing the new neoliberal era in Brazil and around the world. With more than 30 titles published by Editora Vozes - domestically, as well as abroad - the collection remained until 2001. In the wake of September 11, 2001, the collection, Estado de Sítio was proposed to Editora Boitempo, which remains active today. Still in the editorial field, between 2003 and 2004, he coordinated a monthly supplement in Reportagem Magazine at the invitation of Raimundo Pereira. Over those two years, he also participated in the founding of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), alongside Chico de Oliveira and Carlos Nelson Coutinho among others. It was at this time that Paulo approached countless cultural collectives and social movements. Among the first was his involvement with the so-called Group Theater in São Paulo. Within the scope of the movements, he coordinated one of the first training courses at the recently founded Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) from 2005 to 2006. In a more restricted sphere, but not strictly academic, at the initiative of a group of students from FFLCH USP, he initiated a free seminar on Wednesday nights, which would have reached twenty years of uninterrupted activity had it not been for the COVID-19 Pandemic. Paulo's intellectual path goes from the Hegelian left to the Brazilian critical tradition, with special emphasis on the rediscovery of the problem of Philosophy in Brazil, as well as the approach of the ideological and geopolitical world scene, always conceptualized through the prism of our peripheral condition.
