Hello! I am a therapist and philosopher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. People occasionally have questions about my somewhat idiosyncratic academic and professional history, which this page is meant to answer.

Education

I graduated from Harvard College in 2001. My degree was in Literature, although I also took a few philosophy courses and was co-editor of the Harvard Review of Philosophy. My undergraduate thesis – “Giving Up the Book: An Essay on the Epistle Dedicatory” – was advised by Marc Shell.

Given my interests in philosophy and literature, I started doctoral studies in the Stanford Department of Comparative Literature, studying with Richard Rorty, and took continued to take classes in philosophy, especially with Michael Bratman.

I then transferred to the PhD program in the Princeton Philosophy Department, where I was also a graduate fellow in the University Center for Human Values. My doctoral thesis, “The Possibility of Freedom,” was advised by Gideon Rosen (with substantial input from Michael Fara and Michael Smith), and examined by Frank Jackson and Mark Johnston.

My dissertation from Princeton is available online, but deprecated in favor of my later publications on these topics: my encyclopedia entry Abilities (now co-authored with Sophie Kikkert), my articles The Agentive Modalities and Ability, Modality, Genericity, a forthcoming paper on the epistemology of agentive modality, and my book Options and Agency.

Academic Positions

My first teaching position was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I taught courses in epistemology, existentialism, and the philosophy of science.

I then moved to Australia to take up a research fellowship, initially for at the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University, working with David Chalmers, and then the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, working with Huw Price. After about 4 years in Australia, I moved to Cambridge University, where I was a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy.

During this time I developed a substantial interest in Asia, teaching at the Philosophy Summer School in China (Shenyang) and spending “out-of-term” time in Vientiane, Laos. (The picture to the left was taken while teaching in Shenyang).

In 2014, I accepted a position as an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Peking University (Běijīng Dàxué or ‘Beida’), China’s leading humanities university, where I taught undergraduate and graduate courses for several years.

Clinical Work

After my time in Beijing I decided to take a break from academic philosophy and return to United States after about a decade away. I worked developing products at an educational technology company while at the same time doing a postgraduate fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.

I then took a clinical masters’ degree (MSW) at Simmons University in Boston. While at Simmons I had the opportunity to intern at two of Boston’s leading academic hospitals: Tufts Medical Center and Boston Medical Center (BMC). At BMC, I was an embedded psychotherapist within the Center for Infectious Diseases during the COVID epidemic, working primarily with people with HIV and a co-occurring mood disorder or substance use disorder.

Much of my clinical work post-graduation focused on psychosis and its treatment. I was a staff clinician at the Freedom Trail Clinic, an outpatient clinic affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital, for individuals with Schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. I then worked at the CEDAR Clinic, a research and treatment clinic based at the Brookline Center for Community Mental Health, focused on the detection and prevention of early psychosis in adolescents and young adults.

I was independently licensed in Massachusetts in 2023, and the following year I began offering individual therapy to a broad spectrum of clients in private practice, including clients with thought and mood disorders as well as clients who identify as neurodiverse.

Current

I am currently working on a few things. If you want to know what I am up to right now, please visit my now page.

After stepping back from philosophy for several years, I’ve returned to actively doing philosophy, and aim to teach about one course per term, with a focus on introductory and/or interdisciplinary classes. Recently, my teaching has been primarily at Lesley University and Simmons University.

A lot of my work concerns issues at the intersection of philosophy and therapy. I have been especially interested in the nature of addiction, due partly to my own history of alcoholism. My work on this topic led to various interventions and publications, culminating in my book The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction.

More recently, I have been interested in the nature of mental health: what it is, why it matters, and how it is to be promoted. I am currently completing a book on this topic, provisionally titled The Minds We Want: A Theory of Mental Health.

My central professional and personal interest, however, is my work with my clients, and much of my attention is devoted to my private practice and my ongoing clinical development.