Janet Levin is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, where she was a longtime faculty member in the School of Philosophy. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from MIT and her B.A. from the University of Chicago. Levin holds that our feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body, primarily the brain
and central nervous system
.
Much of her work engages with one of the hardest problems in philosophy: how to account for the subjective, felt quality of conscious experience within a broadly physicalist framework. She has also written the entry on functionalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the view that what makes something a mental state depends not on its physical makeup, but on the functional role it plays in a larger system.