He is a professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Carman earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University, where he worked with Dagfinn Føllesdal, but was also influenced by Hubert Dreyfus.
Carman's main areas of interest are in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and in phenomenology.
He is the author of Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Heidegger's Being and Time (2003) and Merleau-Ponty (2008), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (2005).
[1] Carman was featured, along with Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, Albert Borgmann, Mark Wrathall and Sean Kelly, in the documentary Being in the World (2010), which explores the phenomenology of everyday life.