(Photo credit: Sunaina Martin)

Hello! My name is Leonardo Moauro. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the 'Human Abilities' Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin). I earned a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego with a dissertation entitled Perfection and Desire in Spinoza's Theory of Value.

My research focuses on the history of ethics and moral psychology in the early modern period. I am especially interested in the perfectionist tradition, a set of views that understands the good in terms of the development of distinctively human capacities. In recent work, I develop a reading of Spinoza's perfectionism, which I argue is surprisingly rooted in an antirealist theory of value. This leads me to think about potentially overlooked points of agreement between perfectionist and subjectivist views in the contemporary literature on well-being. I also study early modern accounts of the will, especially the nature and conditions of its freedom and its relation to non-rational influences like the passions, custom and habit. 

Aside from philosophy, I enjoy long-distance running, fiction, playing piano, watching soccer, and introducing friends to grappa (with very​ mixed results).