Lucian Ionel is a visiting fellow at the Human Abilities Center at the Freie Universität Berlin since 10/2021. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh on a DFG fellowship from 06/2019 to 09/2021. He holds a PhD from the University of Freiburg and the University of Strasbourg. His main interests are philosophy of mind, ontology, anthropology, history of philosophy. The philosophers he has mostly engaged with are Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. His work is focused on reason and the question of its genesis: how do we come to acquire conceptual capacities; what is it to exercise them; how do rational capacities relate to our life-form. At present, he is exploring the relation between exercises of competence and ascriptions of authority, i.e., capacities and powers; he is also inquiring into the limits of a dispositional account of rational capacities.