Who's my other? World and another in the relation between phenomenology and the philosophy of liberation: rethinking Methodist education in Brazil

Abstract

This essay is the result of the discipline "Hermeneutics and Education: from the phenomenology of imagination to the imagination of hermeneutics in education" (1^st semester of 2015), offered by Prof. Dr. Rui de Souza Josgrilberg, of the Graduate Program of Education at the Universidade Metodista de São Paulo. It relates the themes of phenomenology and philosophy of liberation with a reflection on educational services sponsored by Methodists in Brazil, since of its beginning days in 1881. Its conclusion is that by failing to identify in the Brazilian context a "world" different from that of its North American origins, not open to the Other represented in the “questioning face” of the Brazilian people, vis-à-vis the possibility of another "totality," American missionaries sent to Brazil by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in the last quarter of the 19^th Century, were part of a process that implemented the imperialist domination of the United States over Brazil.