Born in Koper in the Slovenian Littoral, then part of Yugoslavia, where he attended high school. He studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Ljubljana. He obtained a MA with a thesis on Spinoza's criticism of Descartes under the supervision of the philosopher Božidar Debenjak. In 1998, he obtained a PhD with a thesis on natural law in Hobbes and Spinoza. From 1985 to 2021, he was a professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.