Biography

Bio

João Miguel Biscaia Valadas Branquinho was born in Figueira da Foz, a sunny Portuguese city on the Atlantic Ocean, on 30 September 1951. He lived in Maputo (then Lourenço Marques) in Mozambique, East Africa (then a Portuguese colony), from 1951 up until 1968. João arrived in Lisbon in 1968 to read for the first degree at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon. He eventually moved in 1970 to the opposite building, the Faculty of Letters, to read for the first degree in Philosophy. Having obtained this degree in 1976, João taught Philosophy at high school level at several places in Lisbon, among which the Liceu Pedro Nunes. Then he moved back to Mozambique, already an independent country, where he taught for some time at the University Eduardo Mondlane. Having been appointed in January 1981 Probationer Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, he returned to Lisbon, where he has been living since then.
João fathered four sons: Miguel and André, from his second marriage; Tiago and Patrícia, from his first marriage.
Present appointment: Full Professor of Philosophy at the Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon), 2006- . Previous appointments: Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, 2001-6; Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, 1993-2001. Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy at the Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, 1985-1993. Probationer Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy at the Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, 1981-1985.
Degrees awarded: Master of Arts, University of Lisbon, 1985; Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.), University of Oxford, 1991 (title of thesis: Direct Reference, Cognitive Significance and Fregean Sense; main advisor: Tim Williamson); Agregação (Higher Doctorate), University of Lisbon, 2002.
Head of the Philosophy Department, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon (2010-2012); Director of Graduate Studies: M.A./Ph.D. Programme in the Philosophy of Language and Mind, University of Lisbon (1995-2000 and 2001-2002); and M.A/Ph.D Programme in Philosophy, area of specialization: Analytic Philosophy, University of Lisbon (2002-2006)
Coordinator and member of the board of the Master and PhD Programmes in Cognitive Science of the University of Lisbon (2008-)
Coordinator of the LanCog (Language, Mind and Cognition) Research Group (1995-2015)
Editor and Co-Editor of Disputatio – International Journal of Analytic Philosophy (1996-2015)
Invited Speaker at SIFA 04 - Sixth National Conference of the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy: Analytic Philosophy and European Culture, University of Genoa, September 2004.
Organizer of the following international conferences: Conference on The Foundations of Cognitive Science at the End of the Century (Lisbon, May 1998); 7th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (Lisbon, September 1998); First Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy (Lisbon, July, 2001); Fifth European Congress for Analytic Philosophy, ECAP5 (Lisbon, August 2005), 1st Lisbon Workshop on Semantics (University of Lisbon, October 2006), Petrus Hispanus Lectures
President of the European Society for Analytical Philosophy (ESAP), 2002-2005. Member of the Steering Committee of ESAP, 1999-2002 and 2005-2008.
President of the Portuguese Society for Analytic Philosophy(2003-2006)
Member of the Editorial Board of Dialectica , the Official Journal of ESAP (2002-)
Referee for the following journals: Disputatio, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Grazer Philosophische Studien, Australian Journal of Philosophy
Member of the Review Panel “Consciousness in a Natural and Cultural Context” (CNCC), The European Science Foundation (ESF), EUROCORES Programme
Professor at the Summer School in Analytic Philosophy, New York University, Florence, Italy, 2003 and 2005.
Visiting Researcher of Level 1, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil, Federal University of Ceará, 2009