Collaborator . History and philosophy teacher at Odivelas Secondary School
Contact
Research Group
Early Modern and Contemporary Thought
ORCID
Ricardo Serrado holds a PhD in History from the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa and a PhD in Philosophy from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. His research is developed in two main areas: the history of Portuguese medico-philosophical thought and the philosophy of mind. In the field of History, he completed his doctoral thesis entitled The Mind–Body Problem in Contemporary Portugal (1870–1910), in which he analysed how debates on the mind, the body and natural causality were formulated in Portuguese medical and philosophical thought at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. His work has focused particularly on authors such as Miguel Bombarda, Júlio de Matos and Bettencourt Raposo, among others, seeking to understand how these thinkers approached issues such as determinism, the mind–body problem and consciousness. This line of research combines the history of ideas with the intellectual and institutional history of medicine and psychiatry, while also seeking to establish connections with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind and neuroscience. In the field of Philosophy, he completed a second doctoral thesis entitled The Nature of Consciousness: A Monist Informational Perspective, in which he proposes a theoretical model grounded in a naturalistic view of consciousness as a physical phenomenon, conceptualised in terms of ontological information. The thesis develops a monist perspective according to which mind and body are not separate entities, but expressions of the same informational substrate. This approach aims to provide a unified explanation for the emergence of consciousness in biological systems, exploring how information can be represented, felt, and transformed into subjective experience. His academic work has been structured around these two lines of research, developed independently but with points of contact in questions such as the nature of mind, free will, and consciousness. Throughout his career, he has published books and articles in the fields of the history of medico-philosophical thought—offering a new scientific and philosophical perspective on Portuguese intellectual life in the nineteenth century—and in philosophy of mind, contributing both to the critical study of Portuguese scientific traditions and to the contemporary philosophical debate on consciousness. In this context, he has developed critiques of dualist and non-naturalist models, defending a monist and naturalistic perspective on consciousness and reality.
The contents of this page are the responsibility of the researcher.
