Thomas Rule has been an assistant professor at The American University in Cairo (AUC) since September 2021. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation titled The Homely and the Foreign: Heidegger and Thinking the Question of Existential Meaning (2021). As a graduate student instructor, he taught at both the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University, where he earned his MA in philosophy.

Rule’s research and teaching focus on philosophical anthropology and the meaning of human existence, particularly as explored by existential and phenomenological thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. His work argues for rethinking common attitudes and discourse surrounding existential meaning in order to overcome entrenched preconceptions and to approach the question with proper importance. He also examines how philosophical vocabularies such as Heidegger’s—discussing existential meaning and meaninglessness in terms of home, journeying and horizons of intelligibility—can illuminate underexplored dimensions of these phenomena, especially their ethical significance.