In his time as an assistant professor he earned the habilitation (1984) with a thesis about Eine Theorie der Kausalität.
He was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1985/86) and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Irvine (1988).
In 2012 he was the first outside Anglosaxon academia to win the Lakatos Award of the London School of Economics for his book The Laws of Belief.
(2012-2018), PI of the Collaborative Research Center 471 Variation in the Lexicon (2000–2008) und co-initiator of the DFG Priority Program SPP 1516 New Frameworks of Rationality (2011–2018), from which the interdisciplinary, philosophical-psychological Handbook of Rationality (MIT Press 2021), co-edited with Markus Knauff, emerged.
Since 2019 he is PI of the Excellence Cluster EXC 2064 Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science, and since 2020 he is directing his Reinhart Koselleck Project Reflexive Decision and Game Theory.