Portuguese author José Rodrigues dos Santos on philosophy and thrillers
The writer's new novel, Le sixième sens, weaves quantum physics, Buddhist philosophy, and psychedelic research into an espionage narrative.
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Portuguese author José Rodrigues dos Santos has built a reputation for weaving serious intellectual inquiry into page-turning thrillers. His latest work, Le sixième sens (his 27th book), exemplifies that approach: a spy story that doubles as an exploration of consciousness, ontology, and emerging medical science.
"I write because I have things to say. Not just to tell, but to say," dos Santos said in fluent French. The author, who earned two doctorates (one in France), brings parallel careers as a university professor, war correspondent, and evening news presenter in Lisbon. These roles feed his fiction: journalistic efficiency married to scholarly rigor, and the habit of connecting ideas across disciplines rather than staying locked in one specialty.
Le sixième sens brings those instincts to bear on psychedelics—specifically their emerging medical applications. Dos Santos initially resisted the topic when his daughter suggested it. "I said, 'Absolutely not. They destroy lives, they're a cancer of society.'" But his daughter pressed him to investigate the science. He did, exhaustively.
What he found surprised him. Starting in the 1990s, the FDA greenlit research into psychedelic compounds' therapeutic potential. A landmark 2006 Johns Hopkins study examined end-stage cancer patients—people with days, weeks, or months to live, deeply depressed and anxious. After psilocybin-assisted therapy, 80 per cent of them had lost their fear of death, partially or completely. That finding sparked research globally. "They discovered these substances are very powerful for treating depression, especially deep depression, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, neurosis, obsessive-compulsive behaviours, and addictions," dos Santos explained.
In the novel, historian Tomás Noronha investigates a case that leads from Portugal to Nepal, moving through these philosophical and scientific territories. The story brings philosophy and espionage into conversation—philosophy not as academic abstraction, but as lived inquiry into what consciousness is and how we know anything at all.