I started my professional career as a teacher at a Gymnasium, which was a solid basis for a 30-year career as a professor of philosophy.
As an academic, I have dedicated myself to two research themes: reference of singular terms to objects and moral normativity. As for the first, I developed an original reference theory of proper names, a theme of interest to philosophers and linguistics alike. The results of this work were published in a book in 2003. As for morality, I have been publishing regularly and consistently in the field for the last two decades. My original contribution in this area is the development of a strictly naturalistic conception of morality. Because of that, I am one of the pioneers in Brazil in connecting moral philosophy to cognitive sciences.
Between 1994 and 2003, I was a Philosophy Professor at Universidade Federal de Goiás (Federal University of Goiás⎯UFG, Brazil). From 2012 to 2016, I was Dean of the School of Humanities at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos, Brazil), where I taught and researched from 2004 to 2022.
Among my most relevant publications are the books Proper Names: Semantics and Ontology (UnB, 2003), Ethics (Org.) (UnB, 2007), and Echoes of Darwin (Org.) (Unisinos, 2012) and a dozen papers at academic journals (see my Lattes CV for further references: http://lattes.cnpq.br/5936730831586107.
I held a visiting professorship at Tübingen University (2003), the Facultad de Filosofia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (2012) and the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study of the University of London (2013).
I was the secretary of education in the municipality of Porto Alegre in the 2017-2020 quadrennium, with an intense program of reforms to improve primary education in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. I have also had a relevant leadership role in philosophy. I was vice president of the National Association of Graduate Studies in Philosophy and the Brazilian Society of Analytical Philosophy for two terms.
Since 2008, I have been active in corporate education with a focus on the role of ethics in leadership.
I am the CEO of the Mercosul Biennale, which is, since its inauguration in 1997, one of the most relevant biennales in Latin America.
