Susan Lynn Hurley was appointed professor in the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick

University of Warwick

The University of Warwick is a public research university located in Coventry, United Kingdom...

 in 1994, professor of philosophy at Bristol University from 2006 and the first woman fellow of All Souls, Oxford. She wrote on practical philosophy as well as on philosophy of mind, bringing these disciplines closer together. Her work draws on sources from the social sciences as well as the neurosciences, and can be broadly characterised as both naturalistic and interdisciplinary.

Early life

Hurley was born in New York City and brought up in Santa Barbara, California. Her mother, a first-generation Armenian immigrant, was a secretary, whereas her father was an aviation industry executive. After a philosophy degree at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 (1976), she studied law at Harvard, resulting in a degree in 1988, and pursued graduate work in philosophy (a BPhil, 1979, and a doctorate, 1983) at Oxford, supervised primarily by John McDowell

John McDowell

John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work...

. She married the British neuroscientist, Professor Nick Rawlins, in 1986.

Philosophy of Mind

In Consciousness in Action, as well as in many of her articles, Hurley defends vehicle externalism, the view that mental processes do not necessarily have to be explained in terms of internal processes. There is no good reason to assume, Hurley argues, that subpersonal processes on which the mind depends always need to respect the boney boundary of the skull. Hurley's externalism is connected to her critiques of what she has called 'the classical sandwich model of the mind'. Traditionally, philosophers and empirical scientists of the mind have regarded perception as input from world to mind, action as output from mind to world, and cognition as sandwiched between. According to Hurley there is no reason to suppose the mind is necessarily organised in this vertically modular way and, moreover, there is good reason to believe it is actually organised differently. An alternative would be a horizontally modular architecture, which is for example used in Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks

Rodney Allen Brooks is the former Panasonic professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers which have inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research...

's robots. In one of her last texts, Hurley proposes a horizontally modular architecture that could enable social cognitive skills. Hurley's philosophical allies include Andy Clark

Andy Clark

Andy Clark is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Before this he was director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University in Bloomington. Previously, he taught at Washington University at St. Louis and the University...

, Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...

, Alva Noë

Alva Noë

Alva Noë is an externalist philosopher and university professor. The main focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness...

, and Mark Rowlands

Mark Rowlands

Mark Rowlands is a Welsh writer and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami.-Life and Work:Mark Rowlands was born in Newport, Wales and began his undergraduate degree at Manchester University in engineering before changing to philosophy...

.

External links

• Hurley's website at the University of Bristol, which includes electronic versions of many of her papers.