About Me

I was born and mostly reared in Los Angeles. I graduated from Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Cal., in 1980 and headed off to UC Berkeley for college. I studied philosophy at Berkeley and graduated in 1983. While at Berkeley I studied Heidegger with Hubert Dreyfus. In the Fall of 1983 I started graduate school in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where I wrote a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of time in Heidegger and Kant, which was directed by John Haugeland. The Pitt department of my graduate school years was steeped in a commitment to understanding the history of philosophy and approaching contemporary philosophical problems with an eye to their historical provenance. 

My principal scholarly interests lie in modern German philosophy, esp. Heidegger and phenomenology more broadly. I also teach (and occasionally publish on) existentialism and the philosophy of history. I have written two books, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge, 1999) and Heidegger's "Being and Time": A Reader's Guide, 2nd ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). 

For twelve years I served as the director of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies.

I am an avid fan of baseball, film, television, the blues, food, and malted beverages. I like to cook and love to bake bread. I like to spend as many hours as I can rolling along on the DC area's bike paths, equipped with field glasses, enjoying the beauty of the natural environment and the variety of birds that pass through the Mid-Atlantic region.