Claudio Canaparo is currently a visiting professor at Universidad de Quilmes, in Argentina. 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, Buenos Aires, 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 he created the Centre for Latin American Studies. In 2009 he was appointed Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, where he stays until 2015. He was also Associated Researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium between 2007 and 2012. Between 2015 and 2021 he was professor or philosophy at the Académie de Bordeaux in France.
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. From 2015 to 2021 he taught philosophy at the Lycée Stendhal (Aiguillon), at the Lycée George Sand (Nérac), and at Lycée Jean-Baptiste de Baudre (Agen), all in France.
Themes and related subjects
A. 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, having the peripheral spaces of the planet as its main intellectual frame. Themes of his works also include sociology of knowledge (Muerte y transfiguración de la cultura rioplatense, 2005), epistemology and colonialism, authorship theory (The Manufacture of an Author, 2000; El mundo Ingaramo, 2015), and science and writing.
Ciencia y escritura (2003) The book discusses how the activity of writing determines the notion of knowledge which supports the ‘ideology’ of scientificity. Further more, the book explores how, when and why, the laboratory becomes the center of legitimization of modern science. To illustrate the argument, specific as well as generic leading cases, were explored. An article discussing the so-called ‘two-slit experiment’ is the first leading case, and an exhaustive analysis of the journal Nature constitutes the second leading case.
Geo-epistemology (2009) The idea that we cannot establish a critical way of thinking, at least within peripheral areas of the planet, without having a standing in biosphere terms is the main hypothesis of this book. This work attempts to show how to proceed under these premises.