About Me

I’m a child of Jewish refugees from Vienna who fled to London in 1938. I’ve lived in the United States since 1968 and been in a glorious relationship for the past 50 years with Deborah Hertz, an historian. I taught Philosophy at Rutgers for 40 years before retiring. Philosophy is a hard task master – you can spend a lifetime thinking about a problem and hope to make incremental progress in clarifying what is going on even if you can’t solve it. Frustrating as that may seem, to me, it has been a privilege to be paid to spend my days just thinking. Much of my work has revolved around the nature of scientific knowledge. I have written about the nature of explanation, causation, and counterfactual reasoning. More recently I have been thinking about the notion of risk and how we should make choices involving catastrophic risk – like extreme climate change. You can follow the links on this website to learn more about books and papers I’ve published as well as what I am working on now. I hope you will consider subscribing to my blog and join me in a conversation about issues of the day.