Wiesbaden, Germany, 1964. He studied in Frankfurt, New York and Harvard with Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and received his doctorate in 1993 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. He was a professor at the University of Berlin and at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, co-director of the research center "The Formation of Normative Orders" and deputy director of the research center "Justitia Amplificata" based in Frankfurt. In 2012 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation, the highest distinction awarded to researchers in the German language.