About

In January 2019, I joined the Department of Philosophy at Boston University and resigned my position as LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I taught from 2003-2018.  As of July 2021, I am Chair of the BU Philosophy Department. ​

I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1985, and was on the faculty at Dartmouth College until 2003.  I have held visiting positions at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the universities of Bonn, Bern and Luzern. My main area of research is German idealism, in particular the theoretical and practical philosophies of Kant and Hegel. 

I have been awarded grants by NEH, ACLS, DAAD, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation. In 2009/10, I was President of the Central Division of the APA. My publications include numerous essays on Kant and Hegel, and two monographs: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: An Introduction (2008, Cambridge) and Hegel’s Critique of Kant (2012, Oxford).  A third monograph, Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit, will appear with OUP in 2023.​

​I am editor of the volume, The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel(2000).  With Dina Emundts, I co-edited the International Yearbook of German Idealism/Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus  from 2014-19.

​Recently, I was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Our Time in an episode on “Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” alongside philosophers Robert Stern (Sheffield) and Stephen Houlgate (Warwick).  The episode can be accessed here.