L. A. Paul

L. A. Paul is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Professorial Fellow in the Arché Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews. She received her undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry from Antioch College and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Her main research interests are in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, broadly construed. She is the author of Causation: A User’s Guide (with Ned Hall, Oxford UP) and the forthcoming Transformative Experience (Oxford UP).

Paul is especially interested in drawing phenomenology, or the study of first personal experience, back into contemporary analytic metaphysics. Her current work focuses on developing connections between metaphysics and cognitive science, with special attention to the way theories of causation, time, and causal modeling fit with ideas that cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have advanced about how we perceive, learn about, and make inferences about causation, persistence, and time.