This thesis proposes to examine the book of Matias Aires entitled Reflexões sobre a Vaidade dos Homens (Reflections on Vanity), first published in 1752. In that text, Matias Aires offers one of the most negative philosophical insights about the world and the History produced in the eighteenth century. When building his thinking from the concepts of vanity, love, nature, society, time and movement, the scholar shows that men act moved by passions, being vanity the origin of them all. Given the incomplete nature of human knowledge, the narrative of History leads to a collection of successive events that do not serve as teachings. Its existence, however, is not meaningless or without value, since it provides legitimacy to the social differentiation of hereditary nobleness. Based on the observation of this argumentative network developed by Matias Aires, we investigated the world conceptions presented in the author s thought that allowed him to build this particular view of History, as much as of the writing of history. The study of the philosophical categories of Matias Aires is founded on the assumption that the concepts of man, society and the world mobilized by the author must be understood in view of its readability and the first in an attempt to restore the meaning of these categories according to the rhetorical functions in that present.