I was born to Russian immigrants in Maoz Aviv, Israel in 1972. In 1982 my family moved to Los Angeles, where I've spent most of my life. LA is often portrayed as a superficial place, but it is also a fantastically creative place and I consider myself a product of its creative community. My interest in philosophy began both from a general curiosity about the big picture and from the personal need to find a way of life which best fulfilled the apparently-conflicting ethical ideals to which I found myself attracted. It is the aim to understand the world and how to live my life within it in an imaginative and hopefully wise way that still guides me today. I believe that this aim comes through as a part of my enthusiasm for the topics I teach, and mentoring students through their own ethical inquiries has been one of my most fulfilling achievements as a philosopher. After receiving my BA in Philosophy from UCLA in 1995, I worked in a variety of industries including as Sr. Assistant to the Director of Tourism for New York City, Sr. Assistant to the head of production of Geffen Records, and web consultant for Disney Consumer Products. In 1999 I returned to school and completed my MA in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick in England. Returning to LA, I worked for another year as a web programmer for a boutique Hollywood web development firm, before beginning my doctoral studies at the USC School of Philosophy. I recieved my doctoral degree in Philosophy from USC in August 2009 under the inspiring guidance of by Dr. Stephen Finlay, Dr. John Dreher,Dr. Sharon Lloyd. All of thes mentors have provided me with invaluable guidance and insight. After graduation, I accepted my current position as a Research Associate with the new USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics. The institute's mission is to help students acquire values of moral discernment, love of truth and beauty, undertanding of self, and respect for and appreciate of others. My work at Levan involves activites supporting that mission through organizing ethics events and supporting faculty attempts to bring discussions of ethical issues into courses across the curriculum. I am also teaching an undergraduate seminar on Medical Ethics this semester (Spring 2010) and doing academic writing on ethics. In the two years prior to my graduation, I was working at under a Lords Foundation grant to revise and develop a string of business ethics experiential workshops for the USC Marshall School of Business's Experiential Learning Center. I've been very excited about the opportunity to develop these workshops. Not only have they taught me a lot in terms of pedagogy -- particularly as I struggle with the task of developing better ethical deliberators, incorporating various multi-media components within the experiential workshop format, and attempting to assess whether the workshops actually do help make students better ethical deliberators within business contexts. I believe that these workshops also offered me a rare opportunity as an ethicist to practically engage with ethical topics of great immediate concern and (indirectly and nondogmatically) to bring good to the world. It is that same desire to communicate on ethical issues with non-philosophers that led me in 2000 to begin writing critical essays which largely focused on exploring ethical issues relating to the conflict between bohemian ideals and the practical demands of living with others. At that time, I founded GetUnderground.com -- a large award-winning submainstream arts and culture website. Over the next 3-4 years I published 70 or so essays on Get Underground, as well as numerous other magazines and websites. For a while, I self-published and sold some of these essays as bound collections titled The Cutting Edge :: Softened and Wrestling with the Bohemian, but my school work kept me too busy to pursue publication further and I have not written creative essays in the last couple of years. These collections also feel very out of date to me now as they mostly deal with ethical questions I faced in my 20s. I hope to return to popular writing once my dissertation is over. I have a half-finished third collection of essays addressing philosophical topics of interest to creative types titled Philosophy for Artists and Other Practical Folks. I am also in the drafting stages of a non-academic book with my brother, Rabbi Sher, about the comparative virtues of the religious/non-religious life.