Biography

I grew up in Nyack (NY) and went through its public schools. After a year at Mount Holyoke College, I joined VISTA, working on community programs for preschoolers and teenagers in Houston’s Third Ward; after VISTA, I worked at radio station WRVR in New York City as the programmer and announcer for a classical music show.

By the time I was ready to go back to college, I had moved to Sacramento, and so I enrolled first at Sacramento City College and then at UC Davis, which proved to be a stimulating place to major in philosophy. I went on to graduate work at Princeton, where I wrote a dissertation about Descartes’s theory of causality.

My first academic job was a three-year position at Harvard; I joined the philosophy department at Berkeley in 1979 and later served as its chair for five years. More recently I served on the Academic Senate’s Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, chairing it during 2004–05, and I began working in 2006 as dean of Arts and Humanities.

I’ve lived in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood for many years.

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