Lawrence Berger

Lawrence Berger began writing on the philosophy of attention in 1982, and his first article was published in 1989 (“Economics and Hermeneutics,” in Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press). After receiving a PhD in applied economics from the Wharton School in 1985, he was a business school professor at the University of Iowa from 1985 to 1989, then went back to Wharton as a professor from 1989 to 1994. He then worked as a professional economist for a number of years while continuing his philosophical work on attention, eventually receiving a PhD in philosophy at the New School in 2016. His March 2015 article in the New York Times, “Being There: Heidegger on Why Our Presence Matters,” was the most emailed article of the day on nyt.com and attracted more than five hundred comments. The present book is a full-length version of the article with an application to politics. He currently teaches philosophy at Marist College.