Carlos Vaz Ferreira, born at Montevideo, Uruguay in 1872, a graduate of the School of Law, and at twenty-five appointed to the Chair of Philosophy there, was a prolific writer who for more than thirty years presented special lectures open to the general public. As a result he was one of the most influential men of this century in his homeland. Frank and honest and intensely stimulating, Aníbal Sánchez Reulet has termed Vaz Ferreira an “intellectual pontiff.”
From 1929 to 1941 he was, off and on, the Rector of the University and in 1945 he became Director of the School of Humanities in Montevideo, which position he held until his death in 1959.