Her work draws on sources from the social sciences as well as the neurosciences and can be broadly characterized as both naturalistic and interdisciplinary.

Her mother, a first-generation Armenian immigrant, was a secretary, and her father was an aviation industry executive.

There is no good reason to assume, Hurley argues, that subpersonal processes on which the mind depends always need to respect the boney boundary of the skull.

Hurley's externalism is connected to her critiques of what she has called 'the classical sandwich model of the mind'.

In one of her last texts,[3] Hurley proposes a horizontally modular architecture that could enable social cognitive skills.