I am Professor of History, Philosophy, and Political Science at Boston University and the author of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (1985), the editor of What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (1996), Theodor Adorno (2007), and co-editor (with Amelie Rorty) of the Critical Guide to Kant's Idea for a Universal History (2009).
My work has focused primarily on controversies involving the nature, limits, and the legacy of the Enlightenment and I've published a series of articles in such journals as the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, American Political Science Review, The History of European Ideas, and Social Research, exploring how eighteenth-century thinkers understood the notion of “enlightenment” and the ways in which the Enlightenment has been approached by such thinkers as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. I've also explored these issues on my research blog: Persistent Enlightenment.