Patricia Kitcher is widely known for her work on 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's interest in cognition manifested early and has continued to shape and inform her work throughout her career. Her doctoral dissertation de-fended 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 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...