Poverty as an object of social philosophy: rethinking the critical potentials of the alienation

• Grant number: 17/20421-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: December 18, 2017
• End date: February 17, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Hélio Alexandre da Silva
• Grantee: Hélio Alexandre da Silva
• Host Investigator: Michael Lowy
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France

Abstract

The phenomenon of poverty has never been the object of great esteem for philosophy, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it has been systematically ignored by the great systems of philosophical thought. Certainly the same can not be said when attention is focused on the works of the so-called human sciences. In this sense, what this research project aims is to take some steps in the direction of undertaking an investigation capable of philosophically thinking about poverty. To this end, it will be taken as a denial, at some level, of access to what has been socially produced. In other words, poverty will be seen as a social suffering which, in turn, can be understood as the social dimension of frustrated individual expectations that lead, among other things, to the political invisibility of the problems connected with the reality of poverty itself. Then, having thought poverty as a social suffering marked by the lack of access to what was socially produced, a distinction is made between two dimensions that emerge from this consideration, namely an apologetic dimension (which experiences poverty as an individual failure) and a critical dimension (which experiences poverty from its relation to the capitalist social form). Finally, this broad theoretical framework converges towards a path that envisions a specific objective, that is, to investigate how the notion of alienation, thought from Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 can offer subsidies for the construction of a critical notion of poverty. (AU)