About

I studied philosophy and biology as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University and earned my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago. I've taught at the University of Chicago, where I won a Wayne C. Booth prize for excellence in teaching, Colorado College, the College of William and Mary, and the United States Air Force Academy. I am currently a full professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. 

My research is interdisciplinary, drawing from philosophical, artistic, and scientific sources, and devoted to problems in ethics, axiology, and the theory of meaning, the philosophy of language, the nature of poetry and its philosophical significance, and the philosophy of literature and film. 

I've published dozens of articles and book chapters on philosophical issues in Kant and his successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support work on Heidegger and German Romanticism. I co-edited Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy (Fordham UP, 2012) and am the author of Being Here Is Glorious: On Rilke, Poetry, and Philosophy (Northwestern UP, 2015), Heidegger’s Moral Ontology (Cambridge UP, 2018), Agency and Imagination in the Films of David Lynch, with Candace R. Craig (Lexington Books, 2019), and Novalis’s Philosophical Fictions (Oxford UP, 2026). As a translator, I am responsible for Heidegger’s The Question Concerning the Thing, with Benjamin D. Crowe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Novalis: Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings (Oxford UP, 2024), and Novalis: Writings on Nature and Natural Science (in progress and under contract with Oxford UP). My lecture series for The Great Courses on Descartes and his successors in the rationalist tradition was released in November of 2024.

My current projects include an edited volume on transcendental philosophy and poetry in early German romanticism, a monograph on freedom and nature in Kantian ethics, a book on morality on film in the cinema of Terrence Malick, and a popular book-length essay on the philosophy of health and wellness. I am series co-founder and chief editor of Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry.