Víctor Samuel Rivera

Víctor Samuel Rivera (born 1964 in Lima) is a Peruvian philosopher. Rivera belongs to the critical hermeneutics tendency in recent philosophy. He practices the Heideggerian "an-denken" to the Peruvian and Latin American political thought. He has also participated in the Peruvian public debate as a jounalist. He is professor of Peruvian thought and research in hermeneutics on the Philosophy Department of the Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal (Lima).

The philosopher got his degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, where he also made his first postdegree studies; he continued them in the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. He is member of the Philosophy Peruvian Society (Sociedad Peruana de Filosofía) since 1992. He belongs to the International Commission of Political Concepts "Laboratorio Conceptual 1750-1850". He has written "Antenor Orrego: Dos ensayos de hermenéutica política" (Lima: IPPCIAL, 2005, 125 pp.) and "Demencia de la modernidad" (Lima: IPPCIAL, 2005, 120 pp.). He is specialist in political hermeneutics; his thought reveals a strong influence from the philosophers Gianni Vattimo and Martin Heidegger. In the year 2000 he published, together with the journalist Ricardo Vásquez Kunze, "Cosmopolitas y soberanistas" (Lima: ICP, 250 pp.), a commented press compilation about the Kosovo War on that year.

Víctor Samuel Rivera dedicated his first essays to the Modern Western philosophy, particularly to René Descartes' lifework, approximately between 1989 and 2000. He has also written about Hegel, Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Besides his philosophy history essays, he has also written more recent texts related to the philosophical dimension of the concepts of enmity, death, war, violence, justice, postmodern political thought and social exclusion.In his work highlights his critic to philosophical modernity, which is defined as a narcissistic pathology, about which he has incorporated psychoanalysis terminology. He defines the modernity, both political and economical, as a "factory", in an obvious reference to the anti-modern mentality of the XIX century, though it can be noticed some references of the Conservative Revolution and relativistic thought of beginnings of XX century, and the American pragmatism. In that sense, there are some of his texts with a clear counterrevolutionary and anti-liberal tendency, with a severe criticism to the technological civilization.

His most recent work has approached to the heritage of Count Joseph De Maistre's thought. Rivera is interested in the Peruvian thinkers, such as Bartolomé Herrera, Francisco García Calderón Rey, Antenor Orrego, and José de la Riva Agüero y Osma, Marquis of Montealegre de Aulestia.

External links

* [http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/bibvirtual/publicaciones/Alma_Mater/1998_n15/investi_filo.htm "Wittgenstein against Modernity"]
* [http://www.hechosdelajusticia.org/quinta/25.rtf "Riva-Agüero and John Stuart Mill"]
* [http://www.institucional.us.es/araucaria/nro20/perfiles20.htm "After the True Mass. The Reactionnary thought in Bartolomé Herrera"]
* [http://www.cedepperu.org/syp101.pdf "Ontology of bullfighting"]
* [http://e-spacio.uned.es/fez/eserv.php?pid=bibliuned:20563&dsID=hermeneutica_enemigo.pdf "Hans-Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt"]
* [http://racionalidadpractica.blogspot.com/2007/08/descartes-y-el-emperador-la-filosofa.html "Political Philosophy of Descartes"]
* [http://www.revistasolar.org.pe/2/03_rivera.pdf "Ilave. Ontology of Violence"]
* [http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/BibVirtualData/publicaciones/Alma_Mater/Nº20_2001/pdf/demencia_castel.pdf "Démence de la Modernité"]