Professor Susan Hurley was a philosopher of international distinction. After holding a chair in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick (1994-2006) she was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

She achieved international prominence in two fields – legal philosophy and the philosophy of psychology – and did pioneering work to bring these separate fields into constructive contact.

Susan Lynn Hurley was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1954. She graduated from Princeton University in 1976. After taking a BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford she became the first female Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in January 1981. She also took a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School in 1988. She was a tutorial fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1985 to 1994 before taking up chairs at Warwick and, last year, Bristol.

Many philosophers would agree in principle that philosophy can and should find sources of nutrition in other fields of inquiry. But few put this theoretical approval for inter-disciplinary work into practice to the extent that Hurley did.

Her writing, which covers an extraordinary range of topics, brought an encyclopaedic command of relevant material, from outside philosophy as well as inside it, to the service of a penetrating philosophical intellect and a lawyer’s skill in organising an argument. Aspirations to comprehensive understanding came naturally to her. In a less intellectually scrupulous person, this might have led to pretentiousness and hand-waving, but her breadth of ambition was allied to definiteness and scholarly discipline.

In Natural Reasons (1989) she argued that practical rationality functions in the context of a multiplicity of values that are, in a metaphysically unthreatening sense, objective. Her extensive defence of this idea exploits reflections not only in the philosophy of mind and language and the philosophy of law, but also in formal decision theory, a subject in which she made herself expert.

A running theme of the book is a comparison, reminiscent of the main idea of Plato’s Republic, between individual choice by subjects who are susceptible to the pull of conflicting values, and social choice when the polity must take account of the conflicting preferences of different individuals.

Her most influential book, Consciousness in Action (1998), was originally planned under the title (appropriated, in the published version, for the theme-setting introductory chapter) “The Reappearing Self”. The book’s target was a tendency for thought about mentality to have difficulty in finding a place in the natural world for the self, the conscious mind.

Hurley traced the difficulty to the attractions of a picture of consciousness as a point at which perceptual input makes contact with behavioural output. She replaced that picture – “the Input-Output Picture” – with one in which, as she put it, “the self does not lurk hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioural output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in the world”.

Her resources for this project included not only pure philosophical reflection, starting with Kantian questions about the unity of consciousness and the later Wittgenstein’s appeal to the concept of practice, but also empirical findings and empirically responsible theoretical speculation in the physiology and psychology of human, and more generally animal, behaviour.

The rich exploitation of empirical material was not a merely decorative appendage to a purely philosophical argument, but an integral element in a sustained train of thought.

This book, together with work that extends its themes, attracted much attention in the active interdiscipli-nary field of consciousness studies, in which Hurley was a notable figure.

Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (2003) aimed to bring together two trends in recent philosophy that, though they should have been connected, have operated in near isolation from one another. One is the coming to prominence of the idea that distributive justice requires us to correct inequalities grounded in luck while respecting inequalities for which people are responsible. The other is a rethinking of the idea of responsibility.

Philosophical thought about responsibility has moved away, in various directions, from the traditional idea that responsibility for one’s actions resides in its having been possible for one to act otherwise than one did.

Hurley magisterially surveyed and intervened in an enormous literature in both these fields. She argued that “opening the black box” that the topic of responsibility has largely been in reflection about justice, reveals unsuspected problems for the luck-neutralis-ing understanding of the basis for egalitarianism. And she recommended that we should replace neutralising luck with neutralising bias – neutralising influences that distort beliefs about what should be done – as the central element in a conception of distributive justice.

Hurley co-edited a two-volume collection of papers on imitation (2005), and a collection of papers on rationality in non-human animals (2006). And between her books, and while she was shaping up to them, she was prolific in conference presentations, anthology contributions and journal articles. She held visiting posts at Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard and Canberra.

She was active nearly to the end. At her death, as at all times in her working life, she had a great range of work planned and work in progress.

It would be hard to overstate how great a loss her death is to philosophy and the neighbouring intellectual enterprises in which she was also at home.

She was a memorably lively person with a wide range of interests outside philosophy, including scuba diving, skiing, photography and tango dancing, as well as a love of travel to places as diverse as Italy, China and Hawaii. She reluctantly cancelled a projected trip to Australia and Fiji only a few days before her death.

Hurley is survived by her husband, Professor Nicholas Rawlins, and by their two sons.

Professor Susan Hurley, philosopher, was born on September 16, 1954. She died of cancer on August 16, 2007, aged 52