in 1948, all with first-class honors, in mathematics and mathematical physics at University College, Dublin during which time he also worked with Erwin Schrödinger and John Synge at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies both mathematicians famous for their work in general relativity and cosmology.
In 1948, he won a prestigious travelling studentship from the National University of Ireland, funding doctoral studies abroad.
His superior directed him to take his doctorate in geophysics and seismology at the Institute of Geophysics at St. Louis University as a junior Jesuit scholastic, where he specialised in the philosophy of science with a concentration on the philosophy of modern physics with a novel approach from the phenomenological and hermeneutical perspective of Husserl and Heidegger.
Patrick Heelan's sense that he needed more philosophy for this brought him, in two steps, first to an encounter with Bernard Lonergan's 1957 book Insight (starting with the original notes in Latin), and then after a two-year post-doc working with Eugene Wigner at Princeton University (1960–62), which also gave him, at the start his first experience at Fordham University, Dr Heelan returned to Europe to pursue a second doctorate in philosophy (September 1962 – 1964) at the Catholic University of Louvain at Leuven (in Belgium) where he worked with Jean Ladrière, studying both logic and Husserlian philosophy (Ladrière would write the biographical entries on Patrick Heelan, including his first book, for the French Encyclopédie Philosophique Universelle).
The year of 2002, saw the publication of a festschrift, edited by Babette Babich, Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh's Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J.