José Manuel Santos holds a PhD in Philosophy (1982) from the University of Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. Holder of the Habilitation degree in Philosophy/Ethics (1989). He taught philosophy (phenomenology, classic and contemporary French philosophy) as lecturer at the University of Wuppertal, Germany (1986-1992), where he was a member of the Phenomenology Research Group coordinated by Klaus Held. From 1994 he has taught at the University of Beira Interior, where he was Associate Professor of Philosophy, teaching contemporary philosophy, particularly phenomenology, ethics (including applied ethics), and political philosophy. In 2002 he founded, together with Pedro Alves and João Paisana, the Portuguese Association of Phenomenological Philosophy (AFFEN), of which he was president (2002-2005). In 2003 he created, at the University of Beira Interior, the Institute of Practical Philosophy (IFP), a FCT recognized and funded research unit, which he coordinated until 2015. His core research areas are phenomenology, where he has publications on Merleau-Ponty, Hans Blumenberg, Heidegger and Jan Patocka, ethics, including applied ethics, and political philosophy (in particular Aristotle). He was coordinator of two FCT funded research projects "Philosophy and Communication" (2001-2003) and “Subjectivity, ethics and politics” (2013-2014). He was vice-coordinator of the FCT funded project "Phenomenology. Translation of works by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and Glossary of phenomenology terms" (2004-2006).