I received my PhD in Philosophy from the CUNY, Graduate Center in NYC in May of 2011. I received my masters in the Spring of 2007, after taking my qualifying exams in Logic, Epistemology and the History of Modern Philosophy. 

My research has focused on the nature of self-consciousness. However, I have broad interests in philosophy and consider myself a reflective generalist. 

My focus in the philosophy of mind has been on the historical origin of the mind-body problem in the modern period, the nature of concepts, content and consciousness, with particular emphasis on the importance of self-consciousness for understanding these mental phenomena. 

My research is also concerned with philosophy of cognitive science, broadly construed. I am interested in how the mind works and functions. I think that philosophical accounts of the mind can draw insight from empirical fields such as biology, psychology and neuroscience. In particular, I focus on the developmental origins (phylogenetic and ontogenetic) of self-consciousness. 

My research is also informed by Kant and recent neo-Kantians— Strawson, Evans and others— that are interested in the employment of transcendental arguments to make claims about the mind. 

In my research on Kant, I focus on Kant's arguments about the mind in the paralogisms, the schematism of concepts, and his account of self-consciousness.           

While in graduate school, I met my wife, Melissa Cowper-Smith, a painter and teacher of art, in a philosophy of art class at Hunter College. We live on a horse farm in Fort Montgomery, NY during the Fall and Spring semesters and in the Black Hills of South Dakota during the Summer and Winter recesses (although we'll be moving to Conway, Arkansas in July 2011). On my birthday last year, we had a beautiful little boy, Afton. My extracurricular activities include hiking, rock/ice climbing, biking, snowboarding, playing guitar/singing and watching old western movies.