I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, on the banks of the Severn River and in the shadow of the U.S. Naval Academy.  My father was a captain in the merchant marine, my uncle a retired admiral in the navy, and many of our neighbors were retired navy officers or professors at the Naval Academy.  So for a time I aspired to attend the academy.  I attended Severn School in nearby Severna Park for secondary school.  It was originally a prep school for the Naval Academy, with many of the instructors being retired naval officers; my calculus teacher was retired brigadier general from the Marine Corps.  I was first introduced to Socrates in an eighth-grade Latin class.  Poor eyesight kept me from being a viable candidate for the Naval Academy (20/20 vision was required of midshipmen at the time), as well as a growing interest in academic subjects.

I attended Davidson College (1966-70), a good liberal arts college in North Carolina, where I got a strong background in the humanities and discovered philosophy.  I decided to major in philosophy and recognized that my favorite philosopher was Plato, so I taught myself ancient Greek the summer before my junior year, and then took some classes in Greek at the college. 

After college I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Guatemala and El Salvador (1970-72), speaking Spanish and studying my Greek New Testament.  I worked with a lot of wonderful people there, in mostly peaceful circumstances.  But I found myself in the middle of an attempted coup d’état in the city of San Salvador in 1972, where I watched fighter aircraft strafing and bombing fortresses in the city.  (Order was restored a day later, but this was the beginning of El Salvador’s descent into civil war, which broke out a few years later.)   

I then returned to the US to study Greek and Latin more seriously (1973-75), gaining an MA in Classics at Brigham Young University in 1975, writing a thesis on the proem (fragment 1) of Parmenides, and marrying a young lady I met in a Greek class.   

Subsequently I received a scholarship to study classics and especially archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1975-76), which coordinates US and Canadian archaeological excavations in Greece. To get to Athens, my wife and I first flew to Paris, then drove motorbikes through France and Italy, camping along the way with hotel stops at Florence, Rome, Pozzuoli, Herculaneum, and Paestum, took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras, and drove the final leg to Athens.  We enjoyed a marvelous year at the school, experiencing first-hand archaeological sites, museums, and battlefields.   After seeing most of the major archeological sites in Greece on school trips, my wife and I made a side trip to the Aegean coast of Turkey (which was far from the tourist hotspot it is today, and involved riding dolmushes and a little hitchhiking).  We visited the sites of Smyrna, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus, and Didyma, as well as the nearby Greek islands of Chios and Samos. 

I finally enrolled in a doctoral program, in the joint program in ancient philosophy (sponsored by the departments of philosophy and classics) at the University of Texas at Austin (1976-80).  Studying under Alexander Mourelatos and Paul Woodruff, I was exposed to the latest in scholarship and got to meet many visiting lecturers.  I fell in love with Aristotle, whom I had not appreciated before, and wrote my dissertation on his philosophy of action, graduating in 1980. 

I was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy and classics at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where I worked for four years (1980-84).  In 1981 I attended a Summer Seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), on Socrates, held at the University of California, Berkeley, and directed by Gregory Vlastos, the foremost scholar of Socrates.  Here I fell in love with Socrates, and was persuaded that the views and methods of Socrates could be reconstructed from the Socratic dialogues of Plato. 

I subsequently accepted a position at Rice University in Houston (1984-86), then a position as associate professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University (1986).  I was promoted to full professor in 1991, and later (2000) named to an endowed chair as Abraham Owen Smoot Professor of Philosophy, retiring in 2020.  I served as department chair for two terms, 2006-2012.   

In the summer of 1988, I attended an NEH summer institute on Aristotle, held at the University of New Hampshire, where I was able to meet many of the leading scholars in ancient philosophy. 

I was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in 1988-89, where I was privileged to work with Geoffrey Lloyd, Malcolm Schofield, and David Sedley.  My family and I took a side trip to Sicily, visiting Tauromenium (Taormina), Syracuse, Catania, Acragas (Agrigento), Messina, Mt. Etna, and also Croton (Crotone) on the Italian peninsula. 

I served as a visiting professor at Yale University in 1995. 

I helped organize the International Association for Presocratic Studies, which held its first meeting in 2008 at BYU, and I was the first president of the organization. 

One of the perks of academic life is the opportunity to attend national and international conferences and to meet very smart people and to learn from them.  I hope to continue doing that, despite the obstacles that the recent pandemic has presented.