About Me
I am an assistant professor of philosophy at the Ohio State University. I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from UCLA in 2005, and my B.A. in philosophy from Reed College in 1996. I work primarily in contemporary metaphysics. A lot of my research focuses on trying to make sense of the commitments of a tensed or A-theoretic theory of time, and the associated view, called Presentism, that only the present is real. I have allied interests in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, and medieval philosophy, and I’ve done some work on the history of the Liar Paradox in the medieval Arabic tradition.
When not working, I am probably playing with the toddler, working in the garden, or watching TV. If I were the person I’d like to be, I’d be collecting wild mushrooms and guerilla camping from my East German folding kayak.
You can find me on Flickr and Facebook and Twitter.
Software I use:
- Quicksilver (an OSX application launcher and much more)
- TextMate (a powerful text editor)
- Pandoc (to generate HTML, RTF, and ODT documents from markdown)
- Zotero (to gather bibliographic information and PDFs)
- BibDesk (to catalog bibliographic information and PDFs)
- Zot2Bib (to feed data to BibDesk from Zotero)
- Skim (to read and annotate PDFs)
- git (for version control)
- MacPorts (to install unix utilities like git on OSX)
- Evernote (to take quick notes anywhere)
- Dropbox (for easily sharing files between computers)
- OpenOffice 3 (to fine-tune ODT documents generated by Pandoc)
- Blosxom (for webpage management)
Sites I like:
- Cool Tools (“tools that really work”)
- Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”)
- UbuWeb (a massive collection of avant-garde media)
- PhilPapers (a database of online papers in philosophy)
- Leiter Reports (insider gossip for academic philosophers)