I challenge an "English only" view of Paulo Freire in U.S. scholarship, arguing that an exclusive reading of the 1970 Myra Bergman Ramos English translation masks the dialogic and allusive dimensions of Freire's rhetoric. I trace Paulo Freire's use of situação-limite ("limit-situation") to Álvaro Viera Pinto's appropriation of the term in Consciência e realidade nacional from Karl Jaspers's concept of Grenzsituation in Philosophie, Existenzerhellung. A detailed illustration of the semantics of situação-limite is needed to correct for a "glass half full" terministic screen in Anglophone U.S. scholarship, which overly minimizes the term's profile of collective historical transcendence.

Abstract: Despite the impressive influence that Martin Heidegger has over 20th-century thought, there has been little scholarship on how Sein und Zeit has influenced Latin American philosophy. I correct for this critical oversight by investigating how Rodolfo Kusch, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, and Paulo Freire, respectively, use the words ser and estar to critique and creatively reappropriate Heidegger's Sein lexicon in Sein und Zeit .