L.A. Paul

L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University. Her research explores relationships between the nature of the self, transformative experience, decision-making, temporal experience, causation, time, and perception.

She is the recipient of awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University. She is also the author of several books, including Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Causation: A User’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2013), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. In 2020 she received the Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her work on transformative experience has been covered in major media venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, the LA Times Book Review, NPR, and the BBC, and explored artistically, in "The Missing Shade of You", a dance and spoken word performance by the Logos Dance Collective, performed in New York City in 2017 and in the documentary film “Comfort Zone”, about off-piste/extreme skiing in Scotland. She is currently working on a book, under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about self construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption.