Since joining UGA in 1982, I have been pursuing in both classroom and print the project of freeing philosophy of foundations, of surmounting all appeals to the given and to transcendental conditions of knowing, so as to engage the presuppositionless autonomy required for justification in theory and practice.

My book, The Just State: Rethinking Self-Government, culminated my efforts to reconstruct ethics as a foundation-free theory of the reality of self-determination, following up on Reason and Justice, The Just Family, The Just Economy, and Law in Civil Society. My two books, Systematic Aesthetics and Stylistics, analogously tackled the principal issues of aesthetic theory, whereas my recent book, From Concept to Objectivity, examines how thinking can legitimate itself and secure the conceptual determination of objectivity without question-begging. In all these investigations, I have drawn inspiration from Hegel, whose pioneering efforts to overcome foundations in philosophy have been largely ignored by subsequent philosophers in both the analytic and continental traditions.

My penultimate book, Modernity, Religion, and the War on Terror (2007) investigates the relation between modernity and religion, and how it bears upon the war on terrorism. I have just published Hegel and Mind: Rethinking Philosophical Psychology (2010) and I am currently at work on a larger systematic investigation of mind. The first volume of that treatise, The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness, will be published in 2011, and I am now working on its sequel, The Rational Mind: From Theoretical to Practical Intelligence. In the meantime, I have been intermittently returning to an earlier project left incomplete, which I hope to bring to fruition as a book entitled, Rethinking Capital.