Daily Nous's discussion of some of the views I expressed in my interview.
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I was born in Chicago, but spent most of my childhood in Saudi Arabia, with stints in Texas, India, Germany, New Jersey, and California. Although I still work on projects around the world, home is now Northern California— San Jose, where I teach, and San Francisco, where I live.
I began my university education at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, in 1994. I initially majored in chemistry and oceanography but switched to philosophy after taking a medieval and early modern philosophy course, where we studied debates over faith and rationality. It was my interest in the University of California, Los Angeles’s logic and philosophy of language faculty that led me to switch schools. My focus at UCLA was on modal logic, the metaphysics of modality, Kant, and Wittgenstein. I moved up the coast to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for graduate school. There, I became interested in the philosophy of mind and epistemology as they are related to the philosophy of modality. I also developed an interest in the philosophy of economics and business ethics. I wrote my dissertation on the epistemology of modality (how we know what is possible and necessary, as opposed to what is merely actual). My focus was on the use of two-dimensional modal semantics as a foundation for articulating a relation between conceivability and possibility. I moved farther up the coast to San Jose upon my graduation from UCSB. I am currently a professor of philosophy and an occasional director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy at San Jose State University. |