Who licenses knowledge: Freire, Gilson and Vattimo on 19 September

Anniversaries rarely cohere. This one does. Paulo Freire was born in Recife on 19 September 1921. Étienne Gilson died on 19 September 1978, at ninety-four, in the Yonne countryside where he had retired. Gianni Vattimo died in Turin on 19 September 2023. And on 19 September 1796 a Philadelphia printer called David Claypoole filled the front of his paper with a long valedictory letter from a president who had decided not to say any of it out loud.

Four lives and one document, and between them a single question — not what is true, but who holds the warrant to decide what counts as knowledge: which classrooms, which centuries, which languages. Freire's answer was that the warrant is issued and withheld in ordinary schoolrooms, and that the form of a lesson is already a political content. Gilson's was that it is issued by historians of philosophy when they decide which periods deserve to be read as philosophy at all, and that his own profession had disqualified a thousand years on procedural grounds. Vattimo held that the licensing authority has collapsed, that this is an opportunity rather than a catastrophe, and that the cost of saying so is higher than his admirers usually admit. Washington's Farewell Address, never delivered and largely not written by Washington, is the outlier: a text with no claim to authority except that people adopted it.

None of this is comfortable material for a calendar entry. Freire's most famous book could not be published in his own country, in his own language, for six years after he finished it, and was removed from American classrooms as recently as 2012. Gilson won his argument so completely that it is now hard to see it was ever an argument.

Freire's quarrel was with the shape of the lesson itself#

Freire was born into a Recife family that lost its footing in the Depression, and came to adult literacy work through law, secondary-school teaching and the social service arm of the state of Pernambuco. The experiment that made his name was small and very public. In January 1963, in the town of Angicos in Rio Grande do Norte, 380 residents began classes built around generative words — terms drawn from the learners' own working vocabulary, broken into syllables and recombined, so that the material of literacy was also the material of their circumstances. The first regular class, on 24 January, was on the anthropological concept of culture. The fortieth hour fell on 2 April 1963, and President João Goulart came to it, with several north-eastern governors and representatives of the Alliance for Progress. Around 300 of the original cohort were certified as literate. An elderly student, Maria Hermínia, handed the president letters the class had written.

A year and a day later the military took power. The national literacy programme Freire had been appointed to direct was abolished by decree on 14 April 1964; he was arrested on 16 June and held for seventy days in Recife and Olinda; he left the country that September, went first to Bolivia and reached Chile in November. He stayed almost five years, working with agrarian reform agencies and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, spent 1969–70 at Harvard, then served as a special adviser at the World Council of Churches in Geneva from 1970 until the end of the decade. He first came home in 1979 and moved back for good in 1980. In 1989, after the Workers' Party took São Paulo, he became the city's secretary of education — a man exiled for teaching peasants to read, running the schools of the largest city in South America.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed belongs to the Chilean years. Freire drafted it in Portuguese between 1967 and 1969. It reached the public first in translation — Spanish, from Tierra Nueva in Montevideo, and English, from Herder and Herder in New York in Myra Bergman Ramos's version, both in 1970. The Portuguese original appeared in Portugal in 1972 and in Brazil only in 1974. The editorial drafts that circulate on this anniversary routinely give a 1968 Portuguese publication; that is the date of the manuscript, not of any edition, and the distinction matters, because the six-year delay is not a bibliographical curiosity. It is the thesis of the book happening to the book.

The thesis is carried by a metaphor that has outlived its author's control. Education on the prevailing model, Freire wrote, is an act of depositing: "the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat." Banking education treats the learner as a container of known capacity and the teacher as the sole possessor of a finished content. Against it he set conscientização, usually rendered as critical consciousness, and usually rendered badly. It is not a mood of general suspicion and it is not self-esteem. Freire's claim is narrower: that learning to read is inseparable from learning to name one's situation, that naming a situation is the first move in treating it as alterable rather than natural, and therefore that a pedagogy which withholds the act of naming has taught a political lesson whether or not it meant to. That is why he thought a technically excellent literacy course could still be an instrument of domination — an argument close to what Plato's readers extract from the cave, and closer still to the later account of how institutions produce the normal as a fact about people.

The objections are real and should not be waved through. Elizabeth Ellsworth's "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy", in the Harvard Educational Review for September 1989 (vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 297–325), remains the most damaging, because it comes from inside. Teaching an anti-racism course, Ellsworth found that the movement's own key terms — empowerment, dialogue, student voice — presupposed a transparency of communication that her classroom did not have, and concealed rather than dissolved the authority of the person at the front. Feminist readers objected for years to the sexist language of the original text, which was revised for the 1995 edition. Edgar Z. Friedenberg thought the prose pedantic and the opposition underestimated. Brazilian researchers have argued that the Angicos method was better at teaching agricultural workers how to vote than how to read, which, given that literacy was then a condition of the franchise, is either the criticism or the point depending on where you stand. And the banking metaphor is unfair to a great deal of ordinary instruction: some things really are deposits, and a pupil who has not been told the date of the Council of Nicaea is not thereby liberated.

What the metaphor did capture was who gets to authorise a curriculum. In January 2012 the Tucson Unified School District, enforcing an Arizona statute of 2010 that prohibited courses "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" or advocating "ethnic solidarity", shut down its Mexican American Studies programme and removed seven titles from classrooms. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one, alongside Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America and Richard Delgado's Critical Race Theory. The district insisted the books were stored rather than banned and remained in school libraries, which was true and beside the point. In August 2017 Judge A. Wallace Tashima found the law had been enacted and enforced with racist intent, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Freire's question — who decides what may be taught — turned out in that instance to be answerable by a federal judge. Our companion piece today asks what social media is doing to a shared unconscious; Freire's is the prior question, and the answerable one, since what a community is licensed to know is settled well before anybody dreams.

Gilson refused to treat a thousand years as a waiting room#

Gilson was born in Paris on 13 June 1884 and took his doctorate in 1913 with a thesis on liberty in Descartes and theology. The thesis produced the discovery that organised the rest of his life: the vocabulary in which Descartes framed his supposedly fresh beginning was scholastic vocabulary, carried over more or less intact. If the founder of modern philosophy was speaking late medieval Latin in French, then the medieval centuries were not the corridor between antiquity and Descartes that French university teaching took them for.

Making that case meant building institutions to do the work. In 1929 Gilson helped found what became the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, with Henry Carr and Edmund McCorkell of St Michael's College and Gerald Phelan; it received pontifical status in 1939. He held a chair at the Collège de France, was elected to the Académie française in 1946, and in 1951 handed his Paris chair to Martial Gueroult in order to devote himself to Toronto — a French academician choosing Ontario over the Collège de France, which tells you what he thought the priority was.

The intellectual fight came to a head in March 1931, at a session of the Société française de philosophie. Émile Bréhier had argued that "Christian philosophy" was an incoherent expression. Either it meant philosophy vetted by ecclesiastical authority, which was of no philosophical interest, or it meant that Christianity had altered philosophy itself, which had never historically occurred.

"One can no more speak of a Christian philosophy than of a Christian mathematics or a Christian physics."

Gilson's reply inverted the dilemma: the Christian philosophy Bréhier found uninteresting does not exist, and the one he thought would be interesting if it existed, does. The demonstration was the twenty Gifford Lectures he gave at Aberdeen across 1931 and 1932, published as L'esprit de la philosophie médiévale in 1932 and in English as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy in 1936.

The substantive claim underneath all of it is a point in metaphysics, and it is worth stating precisely rather than gesturing at. For Aquinas, in anything other than God there is a real distinction between what a thing is — its essence — and its act of being, its esse. A phoenix has an essence whether or not any phoenix exists; existence is not one more item in the definition. God alone is the case where essence and act of being coincide, which is what the medievals heard in the answer given at the burning bush. Gilson's argument, worked out in L'être et l'essence (Vrin, 1948) and in Being and Some Philosophers (Pontifical Institute, second edition 1952), was that this was the decisive metaphysical move of the thirteenth century, that the act of being is prior to and richer than essence, and that the later scholastic tradition and its modern heirs lost it — reducing being to essence and demoting existence to a bare fact that a nature happens to have or lack. On his account, most of modern metaphysics has been essentialism with the interesting question removed.

Not everyone is convinced this is history. Elliot Polsky has argued that Being and Some Philosophers is original philosophising inspired by some of Aquinas's assertions but engaged chiefly with nineteenth-century theories of judgement and meaning rather than the thirteenth century; the charge of essentialism laid against Duns Scotus has been contested by Scotus's own readers. Gilson, in short, did to the medievals something of what he accused others of doing: he read a period through a problem he had brought to it. A fair criticism, and a mild one. Nobody now teaches a survey in which the years between Augustine and Descartes are a gap, and that is chiefly Gilson's fault.

Vattimo made the weakening of authority into a programme, and paid for it#

Vattimo was born in Turin on 4 January 1936, studied there under Luigi Pareyson, and spent 1963 in Heidelberg in the company of Gadamer, Karl Löwith and Jürgen Habermas. He became professor of aesthetics at Turin in 1969 and of theoretical philosophy in 1982. The volume that named a tendency, Il pensiero debole, appeared from Feltrinelli in 1983, edited with Pier Aldo Rovatti, with contributions from Umberto Eco and Diego Marconi among others.

Weak thought is easy to caricature as intellectual surrender and is not that. Its governing idea is Heidegger's Verwindung, which Vattimo distinguishes sharply from Überwindung: metaphysics cannot be overcome by a stronger philosophy, since a stronger philosophy is simply more metaphysics. It can only be convalesced from. Being weakens, on this account, into the transmission and interpretation of messages — into tradition and language rather than foundation. The theological version is kenosis: God's self-emptying in the incarnation as the model for the weakening of every commanding authority, with caritas left where dogma used to be. Nihilism becomes our sole opportunity, because the violence he cared about was that of a final description permitting no reply — a lineage running back through Gadamer's insistence that understanding is not a method.

The objections arrived promptly. Eco held that interpretation has objective constraints, which weak thought has trouble supplying. Paolo Flores d'Arcais pressed a circularity: if the criterion for preferring one interpretation to another is that it reduces violence, that criterion is itself validated only by the nihilistic reading it was introduced to justify. Others doubted the epochal premise altogether, noting that metaphysical conviction shows little sign of having weakened outside seminar rooms.

The political record complicates matters further, and a calendar entry that omitted it would be worthless. Vattimo sat in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004 and again from 2009 to 2014. In July 2014, on Italy's Radio 24, he said he would like to "shoot those bastard Zionists", called Israel "a bit worse than the Nazis", and suggested Europeans club together to buy better weapons for Hamas. Italian Jewish leaders condemned the remarks; he later told Haaretz that he was ashamed of them and attributed them to provocation. An apology is not nothing, and neither is what was apologised for. It is a hard test case for a philosophy that made the reduction of interpretative violence its central ethical claim.

The Farewell Address was printed, not spoken#

On 19 September 1796 Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser carried, under the plain heading "To the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES", the text now known as Washington's Farewell Address. It was never delivered as a speech. Alexander Hamilton wrote the final version, choosing to start afresh rather than revise the draft James Madison had prepared in 1792, when Washington first thought of retiring; Washington set the themes and, as Mount Vernon's historians put it, lent it his sound. It warned that party spirit furnishes "potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" subvert the power of the people, and against "permanent alliances" with foreign nations. Other papers reprinted it within days, and it entered American civic scripture by circulation.

Which makes it the sharpest item on the date. A text substantially ghost-written, never spoken, printed because a commercial publisher thought it would sell papers, acquired an authority no institution conferred and none could withdraw. Freire wanted to know who authorises a curriculum, Gilson who authorises a canon, Vattimo what remains when the authorising function dissolves. Claypoole's issue of 19 September 1796 is the case where the answer is: readers did, afterwards, and nobody asked them to.

Elsewhere on 19 September 2026#

The 2026 Toronto Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy runs from Friday afternoon, 18 September, to 6.15 p.m. on Saturday 19 September, hosted by the University of Toronto's philosophy department as a celebration of Deborah Black, whose Logic and Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (1990) did for the Arabic Aristotle something of what Gilson did for the Latin one.

At the University of Georgia, the Student Philosophy in the South conference runs on Saturday 19 September, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in 115 Peabody Hall. The department's listing gives the date and the room but not the programme, so the closing lecture on AI ethics attached to it elsewhere is best treated as unconfirmed. A Duke–UNC graduate conference said to be meeting the same day under the title "Knowledge and Society" could not be confirmed against either department's listings; that series has run in March, without a theme. It is not in this diary. Our previous entry covered Pomponazzi, Smart and Hurley on 16 September.