Sílvio Lima was born into a minimally literate household, though his father, João Vieira Mendes Lima, had a good head for figures, and had had some success in trade and in the rice industry. This allowed the young Sílvio, unlike the older brothers in his extensive family, to undergo a rigorous education in the Colégio São Pedro, Coimbra, where he successfully prepared for entry into the university medical school.

An incipient poet, he soon transferred to Philosophy, but at the ancient university he quickly distinguished himself as a student leader, as a republican and supporter of Seara Nova, active in the strike of 1926 and in the production of the periodicals Humanidade and Gente Nova. In philosophy and history of philosophy, he was an exceptional pupil of Joaquim de Carvalho (qv), the outstanding educator and historian of ideas in the first half of the twentieth century at the new Faculty of Letters, which was much affected, from 1932–34, by the rising climate of intellectual repression and extinction of freedom of thought. Sílvio Lima learned his master’s lessons well, on himself being removed from the university for ‘perturbing the life of the nation’, on 16 May 1935, under the terms of decree no. 25.317, which expelled thirty-three senior state and university functionaries, amongst them Aurélio Quintanilha, Abel Salazar, Rodrigues Lapa, and Norton de Matos. After his readmission, in 1942, he was also obstructed politically, by Salazar in person, despite the notable texts and theses he had produced and the remarkable teacher he proved to be, as a disciple of the Franco-Swiss ‘new school’, which brought him a teacher-training post in the Escola Normal Superior de Coimbra. He took premature retirement, in 1965, suffering from depression, practically giving up writing, apart from one text, which laid out his ethical testament, the Carta aberta às universidades portuguesas (1968). The text was censored, and was first published, along with a few other short commentaries, a few days after the revolution of 25 April 1974.

The remarkable position Sílvio Lemos occupies in the Portuguese historiography is not due only to his being a ‘method’ historian, as at the time was understood of the followers of positivism and neo-positivism methodologies of the French school of Langlois and Seignobos, or to his professional devotion to researches based on documents and archival material — he was primarily an essayist, philosopher, psychologist and epistemologist. His main contribution was the great innovation he brought into these areas in a Portuguese cultural context.

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