Patricia Kitcher

Patricia Kitcher
Residence	New York, New York, United States
Nationality	United States
Fields	Kant Philosophy of psychology
Institutions	Columbia University
Alma mater	Wellesley College (B.A.); Princeton University (Ph.D.)

Patricia Kitcher (born in 1948) is the Roberta and William Campbell Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, widely known for her work on Immanuel Kant and on philosophy of psychology.

Born Patricia Williams, she attended Wellesley College and then graduate school in philosophy at Princeton where she studied with George Pitcher. Kitcher has held faculty positions at the University of Vermont, the University of Minnesota, and University of California, San Diego, and a visiting position at University of Michigan. In 1998 she went to Columbia University where she became the Mark van Doren Professor of the Humanities and chair of the philosophy department. She lives in New York City with her husband, Philip Kitcher, also a philosopher, with whom she has two sons, Andrew and Charles.

Kitcher's interest in cognition manifested early and has continued to shape and inform her work throughout her career. Her doctoral dissertation defended a psychological continuity criterion for personal identity but extended the scope of the psychological criterion beyond that traditionally posited to include broader and more abstract cognitive characteristics, such as cognitive approach or cognitive style. Since then her work has ranged widely from traditional philosophy of psychology, to Sigmund Freud, and ultimately to her greatest philosophical passion: Kant scholarship.

In her early work Kitcher wrote a number of papers in philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. She argued for the viability of intentional psychology and the autonomy of functionalist psychology from neurophysiology. Later work predominantly concentrated on analysis of problems stemming from the interpretation of Kant's first Critique. Kitcher has written numerous articles on the forms of intuition, Kant's epistemology, self-consciousness, and on how transcendental arguments work. Kitcher has written two books that also pursue psychological themes. Kant's Transcendental Psychology was a radical departure from most Kant exegesis. The book makes two main claims about the Critique of Pure Reason. First, contra Peter Frederick Strawson, Kitcher argues that to understand synthetic a priori knowledge, it is essential to consider transcendental psychology. Second, she explicates a Kantian argument for the necessity of an integrated thinking subject, which serves as a reply to David Hume's denial of the unity of the self.

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