Philosophy

Hello! I am Sérgio Farias de Souza Filho and here you find some information about my academic work in philosophy of mind, language and metaphysics.

I am Professor of Philosophy ("Professor Adjunto A") at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco and Permanent Professor of Postgraduate Program in Philosophy at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil.

My primary areas of research are intentionality, teleosemantics and other naturalist theories of mental representation, biological function, rule-following and the phenomenal character of consciousness. 

I received my PhD in Philosophy at King's College London, where my leading supervisor was Professor David Papineau. I also worked under the supervision of Professor Matthew Parrott. In my thesis, I developed and defended a variety of a teleological theory of mental representation (teleosemantics) in order to give a naturalistic account of mental representation. You can find my thesis here. 

I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, working with Professor Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira and funded by FAPERJ (I was previously funded by CNPq). Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of São Paulo working with Professor Osvaldo Pessoa.

Below you can see a photo with me sitting beside my favourite lusophone poet, João Cabral de Melo Neto, in my homeland in Brazil!