This is a picture of me and my son Eli in South Carolina.

I am Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Hofstra University. I work on philosophy of mind and metaphysics and sometimes philosophy of language and also history of philosophy.

For the last few years I've been working on the mental causation problem. The problem is this: all causation is physical causation -- what makes the world go around is the physical laws and how the tiniest particles behave according to those laws. But then there's no room for anything else to do any causing. So the real cause of that hand in back of my head is the motion of the molecules of my son -- not him (devilishly) choosing. And the problem is (like so many philosophical problems) that that's just crazy. That hand is there because he put it there. (And, of course, because his molecules-in-motion all led to that happening.)

Here's a link to my book, Mental Causation: The Mind-Body Problem, Columbia University Press, 2008.

I got my Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of California,  Berkeley Philosophy Department, and my M.A. in Philosophy. My B.A. is in Russian from Columbia College of Columbia University.

Here's a link to my current CV.

Here are some classes I've taught.

Here are some of my published and unpublished papers in philosophy.