About Me

Writer and Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York. I study madness, the evolution of mind, and purpose in nature.

I’m a writer and philosopher whose work explores the history of psychiatry and new ways of understanding madness. I write The Biology of Human Nature column for Psychology Today, where I examine alternatives to psychiatry’s dominant medical model. My most recent book, The Madness Pill: One Doctor’s Quest to Understand Schizophrenia (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), tells the story of a group of mid‑century scientists who used drugs like LSD and amphetamines to induce schizophrenia‑like states in healthy volunteers, and how their quest helped usher in modern biological psychiatry.

I also write academic books and articles on the future of mental health, the evolution of mind, and purpose in nature. My book Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2022) depicts the history of psychiatry as a clash between two paradigms, one that sees mental illness in terms of pathology and another in terms of purpose. The second edition of The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2022) approaches classic questions about mind through an evolutionary lens, with expanded chapters on race, sex and gender, and the idea of human nature. I’ve also written What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which develops a philosophical account of biological functions and their role in medicine, along with a companion volume, A Critical Overview of Biological Functions(Springer, 2016).