I was born in Buffalo but grew up in the tiny town of Elma, NY, where I went to county fairs with my 4-H Club, ran cross-country, edited the yearbook, and wandered through field and forest.
At beloved Oberlin, I majored in English and Philosophy, with quite a bit of creative writing. Then, Columbia for grad school. There I benefitted from the example of my advisor Arthur Danto, and from the opportunity to teach in the Columbia "great books" curriculum, with my own section blasting through Homer to Dostoevsky, with all the other authors you might have heard of in between.
I wrote my dissertation ("Picturing," on the ontology and epistemology of pictorial representation) while in Boston and teaching part time at MIT and Tufts. At Tufts I had the good fortune to fall in with Daniel Dennett, who remained a mentor and friend until his death in 2024.
My first tenure-track job was at UC Santa Barbara, beautiful in every respect, but I missed winters and deep woods, and made my way back east, with one-year stints at Simmons College and Harvard. Finally I landed happily at Trinity College, where I expanded from my philosophy foundations to neuroscience, then music, and then Shakespeare.
One thing this site cannot fully capture is four decades of teaching. On the edge of retirement, I compiled short videos blasting through two of my flagship courses, Minds and Brains and Shakespeare as Philosopher. (The videos proceed from the last class meeting backwards to the first. One feature of my courses are student reaction papers at the end of each class meeting. Many of these were folded into class plans.) My online course, The Conscious Mind: A Philosophical Road Trip, also embodies some of my approach to teaching.
I'm happily married (to a professor of history) and we have two wonderful daughters. As a family, we've lived in Finland and China for more than a year each, thank you Fulbright Program! Various topics, including Words and Etc., include more on those adventures, and other excursions outside the academic box.