I am a philosopher, professor, writer, and artist.

I was born in East Timor and moved to Portugal shortly after. I grew up in Portugal. I lived just outside of Lisbon, by the ocean. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Lisbon and continued on to do a MA and a Ph.D. at the same university. I moved to the United States while I was a Ph.D. student and I have mostly lived here ever since.

As a philosopher, I am fascinated by a wide range of topics. I love looking at the history of philosophy, and I am especially interested in Plato’s dialogues. My favorite philosophers are David Hume and Mary Wollstonecraft. I also am fascinated with looking for philosophical themes in Film and TV, and in popular culture in general. My two current favorite topics are Free Will and the Trolley Problem. I am also interested in Virtue Ethics, Utilitarianism, and Care Ethics. I am particularly interested in developing research on the work of women philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Carol Gilligan, Virginia Held, Christine Korsgaard, and Martha Nussbaum, Judith Jarvis Thompson, Julia Driver, Susan Wolf, among others.

As a socially conscious individual, I have researched the idea of establishing a Basic Income. I have written a book with three portuguêse colleagues on the topic which won the first prize from the Portuguese Philosophy Society in 2019. According to our book, a basic income is necessary for any kind of basic freedom in modern society to be achieved. In contemporary societies that are prosperous, I believe that working for survival is akin to slavery and that every human being should be free to choose their occupation and how they wish to live their lives, without having to work simply to satisfy their basic needs. For many, basic income can seem an absurd chimerical dream, but I am reminded that so did votes for women not so long ago. A basic income would not solve all problems, but it would be a liberating first step.

As a researcher, I have worked on the Philosophy of Mind, especially on the problem of mental content and also the problem of consciousness. I presented at several Towards a Science of Consciousness conferences, on topics such as mental imagery, consciousness and qualia, memory, and the method of loci, among other topics. My Ph.D. was on the early Wittgenstein, and I published on The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Currently, I have been working on Mary Wollstonecraft, a philosopher that I believe should be part of the traditional philosophical canon. I have also been working on the topic of Free Will and on Philippa Foot’s solution to the Trolley Problem.

Alongside these traditional philosophical exploits, I have always been fascinated with relating philosophy and film. I worked on the connection between the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and consciousness. I have recently published Free Will and a Clockwork Orange in the journal Ethical Perspectives. I published Acting and the Self, a paper relating Hofstadgers book I am a Strange Loop to method acting. I have also written pieces on other films, such as 14 Hours, Sexism and Homophobia in Hollywood, Hotel Rwanda and Moral Agency, and Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Moral Status. This is an area that I indeed to keep working on in the future, and that I find to be interesting to a wider audience, beyond the traditional academic milieu, as well as particularly interesting for college students.

I currently teach at the Univerity of New Orleans, as well as online at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Rowan College Burlington County. I teach Intro to Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Law, Film and Philosophy, and Ethics in Film.