Vilém Flusser, a Brazilian philosopher of language

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge and recognition of Brazilian philosophy by presenting some aspects of the theory of one of our most original authors, Vilém Flusser. Of Czech and Jewish origins, Flusser was naturalized as a Brazilian and lived for over thirty years in São Paulo. During this period, he wrote an important but little-studied part of his work. This paper analyses certain aspects of Flusser's ontology which characterize his experience on Brazilian intellectual ground. The paper focuses on his thesis that language and reality are the same, or rather, that the various languages can be identified with various realities. This idea was defended in Flusser's first book, Língua e realidade (Language and Reality), which was published in 1963.