[1] Rosenberg graduated from Stuyvesant High School (along with Richard Axel, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Ron Silver and Allan Lichtman) in 1963 and from the City College of New York in 1967.

His graduate students have included Samir Okasha, Grant Ramsey, Frederic Bouchard, Rachel Powell, Nita A. Farahany and Marion Hourdequin.

Rosenberg introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology.

Rosenberg is among the few biologists and fewer philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism (see his 2010 on-line debate with John Dupré at Philosophy TV).

"[1] In 2011 Rosenberg published a defense of what he called "Scientism"—the claim that "the persistent questions" people ask about the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the foundations of value and morality, the way the mind works, the basis of personal identity, and the course of human history, could all be answered by the resources of science.

[8] Rosenberg has contributed articles to The New York Times Op/Ed series The Stone, on naturalism, science and the humanities, and meta-ethics, and the mind's powers to understand itself by introspection that arise from the views he advanced in The Atheist's Guide to Reality.

This work develops the eliminative materialism of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, applying it to the role ‘the theory of mind’ plays in history and other forms of story telling.

[citation needed] Biologist Richard Lewontin and historian Joseph Fracchia express skepticism about Rosenberg's claim that functional explanations in social science require Darwinian underlying mechanisms.

[26] Rosenberg's 2015 novel, The Girl From Krakow, Lake Union Publishing, is a narrative about a young woman named Rita Feuerstahl from 1935 to 1947, mainly focusing on her struggles to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Germany, under a false identity.

This novel offers an explanation of why the Western Allies—the US, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia—kept the breaking of the German Enigma code secret for 30 years after the end of the Second World War.

Four characters from his earlier novel figure in the sequel, Rita Feuerstahl, her partner Gil Romero, her son Stefan and a former Gestapo detective still working for the German Federal Republic, Otto Schulke.