About me
I was born in a small town in Germany called "Wehrda," which is now part of Marburg an der Lahn. I grew up in Kirchzarten, a yet smaller town in the Black Forest close to Freiburg, which almost nobody has ever heard of. When I was 15, my family moved to Aachen, which, some might say, functioned as the capital of the western world around 800 AD. Needless to say, those days are over. There were some brief to medium length interludes in Bonn, which used to be the not very spectacular, temporary capital of (West-)Germany before the re-unification, where I studied philosophy, physics, and psychology as an undergraduate, and in Oxford, where I was a visiting student for a year. A good chunk of the waking hours of the first two decades of my life were spent in chlorinated water, which is still a preferred environment for me.
I moved to the US in 1997 to pursue a PhD. in philosophy at Princeton, but really arrived in America only when I accepted a job at Notre Dame in Indiana in 2002. After almost a decade in the heartland, I decided that it was time to move a little bit closer to Europe again, and so I made my way back east, first to Pittsburgh where I stayed for 3 1/2 years, and eventually to New York City where I have been living happily ever since.