I am an associate professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. In my work, I aim to develop and articulate post-colonial and cosmopolitan forms of rationalism and humanism, by reflecting on the conceptions of philosophy drawn from Islamic philosophers (especially Alfarabi and Avicenna) and their modern interpreters (e.g., Corbin and Nasr). These conceptions assign a pivotal role to ethics as the practice of spiritual exercises and the necessary propaedeutic to philosophical sciences. Along the same line, I work on the primacy of ethics in Ancient philosophy (drawing from the readings of Hadot and later Foucault), the ethical dimension of Wittgenstein's method in the Tractatus, and the importance of ethics in Heidegger's phenomenological method (in Being and Time). When I am not teaching and writing on ethics, I take on (the not unrelated) Pittsburgh neo-Hegelians (Brandom and McDowell) in their efforts to rethink intentionality and foundationalism in analytic metaphysics and epistemology.