João Constâncio is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the NOVA University Lisbon, where he teaches since 1996. He earned his PhD there in 2005 with a dissertation on the images and conceptions of human life in Plato. He has published extensively on Nietzsche, and also written and lectured on fundamental questions of Aesthetics, Philosophical Anthropology and the Philosophy of History in the works of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger.
His most recent projects include a book on Hieronymus Bosch (Sobre o absurdo. Tentações de Santo Antão, de Hieronymus Bosch, Lisboa, Documenta, 2024), a book on Plato’s Phaedrus (Três discursos sobre Eros. Meditação sobre o Fedro de Platão, Lisboa, Tinta-da-China, 2025), and a translation and commentary of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (forthcoming). He is also editing, together with Simon May, a volume titled Who is Heidegger’s Nietzsche?, which is due to appear in 2026 in Cambridge University Press. He is the author of Arte niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (Tinta-da-China, 2013) and co-editor of five books on Nietzsche: Nietzsche on Instinct and Language (De Gruyter, 2011), As the Spider Spins (De Gruyter, 2012), Nietzsche e a Modernidade (Tinta-da-China, 2014), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (De Gruyter, 2015), and Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017). His articles include, for example, ‘On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, Nietzsche-Studien 40 (2011), pp.1-42, and “Time, Death and Boredom in Schopenhauer: Existential Themes in His Theory of (Self-)Consciousness”, in: The Schopenhauerian Mind, ed. D.B. Woods/T. Stoll, London, Routledge, 2024, pp. 95-109.
Since 2019, he is the Director of the research institute for philosophy at NOVA University Lisbon (IFILNOVA, Instituto de Filosofia da NOVA), and the Coordinator of the PhD Programme in Philosophy. Previously, he was Executive Coordinator of the Philosophy Department and Coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Aesthetics and Artistic Studies at NOVA FCSH. With Maria João Mayer Branco, he was the co-founder, in 2010, of the Lisbon Nietzsche Group, a research group which has, since then, been awarded funding for four major research projects and published more than 10 books and more than 50 articles in top indexed journals. His academic affiliations include being a Member of the Scientific Council and Vice-President of the HyperNietzsche research group, based at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris/CNRS, and Member of the Editorial Board of the international journal Nietzsche-Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch der Nietzsche-Forschung (Walter de Gruyter).
