I studied Philosophy, Dutch Language and Literature and Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen, passing the (pre-Bologna) Dutch doctoraalexamen in philosophy (MA) in 1993, with distinction. My MA dissertation "Facts and Events", in Philosophy of Language, was supervised by Pieter Seuren, whose intellectual passion and whose love of language and the people who speak it has never ceased to inspire me. 

My first academic post was at Leiden University, where I was a researcher in the Philosophy Department until 1999, division Ethics, Social Philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Culture, where I worked on Whitehead's process philosophy under supervision of Wouter Oudemans. He taught me the difference between, as he called it, "real philosophy" and "philosophology", showing me that philosophy is not one of the sciences and does not use the methods of the sciences to increase knowledge. "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. -Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain" (Wittgenstein). Or, in Whitehead's words, "philosophy is the eliciting of self-evidence". This idea, with far-reaching consequences, stayed with me and is responsible for much of the joys as well as the sorrows of my life in the academy. I look at our existence in speech through the lens of this view of the nature of philosophy and, vice versa, I think that the reflection on speech is a good place for this kind of philosophy to be done. I was a visiting researcher in the highly creative and welcoming Process Philosophy group at Leuven University for a year, learning from Lewis Ford, and, on several occasions, at Memorial University Newfoundland, where I was screeched in and worked with the late James Bradley, whose ground-breaking work on Whitehead and whose notion of speculative metaphysics as concerned with strong theories of existence have been formative for me. 

In 1999 I left academia for a few years and worked for Royal Dutch Shell in various roles until 2006, developing sustainable and inclusive communication environments and learning about the forces that influence society, the futures we might make and how to imagine and shape them, individually and collectively. During that period I was also a part-time lecturer in Leiden. In 2006 I moved to the University of Central Lancashire, where I taught communication, philosophy of language, rhetoric, English language and linguistics. In 2013 I was appointed Reader in Philosophy and Critical Theory in the English department. I designed and led (since 2008) the MA in Rhetoric there. The aim of the program was to educate conscious communicators, aware of what it means, in theory and in practice, to be a speaking being. In 2013 I joined Middlesex University. I have been an honorary visiting fellow, and later Associate Fellow and Research Centre Director, at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, since 2005, where my focus is on the anticipatory philosophy of Ernst Bloch. I have also held visiting appointments at the University of Bochum (Research Centre for Classical German Philosophy) and, as Erasmus lecturer, at the University of Tübingen (Department of Communication) and Tel Aviv University (Department of Philosophy).