Returning from Paris, he entered the graduate program in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where the heat of continental philosophy slowly gave way to the light of the Anglo-American tradition and ultimately earned a Ph.D. He wrote a dissertation on aesthetics entitled “Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life.” This dissertation, one of the first books, is a lengthy study of everyday aesthetics. It examines everyday activities with an aesthetic or artistic dimension that were overlooked at the time, such as interior decoration, walking, and collecting. In subsequent work, he explored the implications of everyday aesthetics for fundamental concepts in aesthetics. Melding phenomenological concerns for everydayness with the limpidity of Anglo-American tradition, his articles have been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Philosophy and Literature, and Estetika, among others. He has been a Renwick Fellow of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and a recipient of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council Award for Arts Writing.