Partnership: The project “Dunamis in the History of Philosophy”, based at the Logic and Metaphysics Graduate Program (PPGLM) of UFRJ, has international agreements signed with the University of Ottawa and the Università di Roma, La Sapienza.
Professors: Carolina Araújo (UFRJ), Francisco Gonzalez (Ottawa), Francesco Fronterotta (Roma, La Sapienza), Catherine Collobert (Ottawa).
Students: Felipe Ayres de Andrade (PPGLM-UFRJ), Matheus Pamplona (PPGLM-UFRJ), Luciana Valesca Fabião Chachá (PPGLM-UFRJ).

Main features: My research is on the concept of power (dunamis) in Plato. While working at the University of Ottawa in 2020, I gave a talk to the Department of Philosophy on November 20th under the title “Power Ontology in Plato’s Sophist”. During this period, I also developed a thesis on the importance of Power Ontology for Plato’s Theory of Justice. Insisting on power as a metaphysical, instead of a political concept, I concluded that Plato’s theory of justice offers an interesting alternative to consider some problems on morality, particularly when it comes to the natural limits of our choices. This led me to write a whole book, “Cooperative flourishing in Plato’s Republic”, which will be publish in England in 2022.
I am also working on a collective Editorial Project on “Platonic Power”, with 20 scholars from different countries and institutions, including our main partners. An online workshop to discuss the work in progress will be held in October 2021 at PPGLM-UFRJ. The volume shall be published in 2023.
As for the philosophical issues I am working on, I would present them as follows:
The divorce between nature and morality characterizes modern philosophy. Hume’s famously claimed that no “ought” should be inferred from “is,” raising great suspicious on the validity of normative standards. Philosophers have since then tried to ground “ought statements” in a human telos that would serve as a principle for morality. This led them back to the Ancient Greeks. My study concluded that we find in Plato a welcome proposal for grounding morality on the practice of “citizenship.” Following Plato, I understand that communitarian life is natural to human beings and intrinsic to their welfare. Because I assume this natural approach, I make a case for dropping the concepts of happiness or morality based on duty in favor of the concept of flourishing. Flourishing is the best development of a human being’s natural powers. Because I assume that communitarian life is necessary to human beings’ welfare, I defend that we should ground our morality on the concept of cooperative flourishing, the flourishing of citizens. I think this is precisely what Plato’s Republic does.
Cooperative flourishing is the result of actions according to ends that are not obtrusive to the end of others. It is based on the assumption that if we act according to our natural powers, we do not commit us to violence towards others, generating a sustainable state of affairs. Modern philosophers also challenged the existence of such powers. Hume tried to deny power causation claiming that it is reducible to logical inferences. Contemporary physics and metaphysicians have proved Hume to be wrong on this assumption. So I think I have fairly good reasons to argue for both the reality of powers and justice as the sustainable flourishing of citizens.