Brief Background

I was born in Syracuse, New York in 1969, where I graduated from Corcoran High School. In 1985, I went to Lunen, West Germany for a year under the auspices of a Congress-Bundestag scholarship. After my year in Germany, I enrolled in the Fall of 1986 at the State University of New York at Binghamton. After a year at Binghamton (including a transformative seminar in philosophy of language with Jack Kaminsky), I transferred to Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, with the intention of studying Kant and Hegel. I did study Kant and Hegel, but I also took seminars on Frege, Husserl, Dummett, and Wittgenstein. Realizing that I preferred philosophy of language and logic to Kant and Hegel, I transferred back to the United States, and arrived at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as a junior in the Fall of 1988. Fortunately for me, Peter Ludlow and Richard Larson  had also recently arrived at Stony Brook, and provided me with a steady diet of courses in philosophy and linguistics. After graduating from Stony Brook in May 1990, I started in the Department of Philosophy at MIT in September of 1990. After defending my thesis in January of 1995 (with Robert Stalnaker as my supervisor),  I went to University College, Oxford as a stipendiary lecturer. Two months into my time at Oxford, I accepted an offer from the Department of Philosophy  at Cornell University. I spent five years at Cornell, and moved to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan as an Associate Professor in the Fall of 2000. After four years at Michigan, I moved in the Fall of 2004 to my current department at Rutgers University.