[6][7] Peter Gordon received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Reed College (1988) after a stint at the University of Chicago.

[4] Gordon spent two years (1998–2000) at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2000.

[2] In Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010), Gordon reconstructs the 1929 debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland, demonstrating its significance as a point of rupture in Continental thought that implicated all the major philosophical movements of the day.

The main claim of the book is that Adorno was inspired by the unfulfilled promise of these schools to combat traditional metaphysical thinking, which led to the development of his "negative dialectics".

[17][18][19] In the most recent years Gordon has published books such as Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Seculariation (Yale University Press, 2020) and a major reinterpretation of Adorno's philosophy, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2023 and the University of Chicago Press, 2024).