Carol Edith Cleland (born 1948)[1] is an American philosopher of science known for her work on the definition of life[2] and the shadow biosphere,[3] on the classification of minerals by their geological history,[4] on the distinction between historical and experimental approaches to science,[5] and on the Church–Turing thesis on theoretical limits to physical computation.
After starting as a physics major but finding herself ill-suited to experimental work, and trying geology but finding it too male-dominated, she discovered her love for philosophy in her junior year but ended up majoring in mathematics because her science studies had left her much closer to completing the degree requirements for mathematics.
[8] She completed her Ph.D. at Brown in 1981;[10] her dissertation, Causation: An Irreducible Physical Relation, was supervised by Ernest Sosa.
[11] On the completion of her position at Wheaton College, she spent another year as a software engineer before returning to academia as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for The Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and then, in 1986, joining the University of Colorado Boulder as an assistant professor again.
[12] She is the co-editor, with Mark A. Bedau, of The Nature of Life: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives from Philosophy and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2010).