[4] Velleman received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1983 under the supervision of David K. Lewis.
He taught previously for more than twenty years at the University of Michigan before moving to NYU.
He is founding co-editor with Stephen Darwall of Philosophers' Imprint,[5] an on-line, peer-refereed philosophy journal.
Several of his former students are now established philosophers, including Connie Rosati at the University of Texas, Austin and Nishiten Shah at Amherst College.
[citation needed] Velleman is a defender of constitutivism in ethics, arguing that moral standards arise from the nature of action.