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It's a little before six in the morning and quite cold on the beach. It's low tide, and the sand is wet and hard-packed and stony. This early on a Sunday, there are often only two people here, on the California coast just north of San Diego. Patricia Churchland is throwing a rubber ball into the ocean for her two dogs (Fergus and Maxwell, golden retrievers) to fetch. Her husband, Paul Churchland, is standing next to her. They are both wearing heavy sweaters. They are in their early sixties. They are tall--she is five feet eight, he is six feet five. They come here every Sunday at dawn.
Pat is constantly in motion, throwing the ball, stepping backward, rubbing her hands together, walking forward in a vigorous, twitchy way. She has pale eyes, a sharp chin, and the crisp, alert look of someone who likes being outside in the cold. (Even when it is sunny, she looks as though she were enjoying a bracing wind.) She seems younger than she is: she has the anxious vitality of a person driven to prove herself--the first to jump off a bridge into freezing water. Paul stands heavily, his hands in his pockets. He is still. He nudges at a stone with his foot. He looks up and smiles at his wife's back. He has a thick beard. He looks like the sort of person who finds it soothing to chop his own wood (and in fact he is that sort of person).
Paul and Pat met when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and they have been married for almost forty years. They are both Canadian; she grew up on a farm in the Okanagan Valley, he, in Vancouver. They have two children and four grandchildren. They live in Solana Beach, in a nineteen-sixties house with a small pool and a hot tub and an herb garden. Each summer, they migrate north to a tiny island off the Vancouver coast. Both are professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. They have been talking about philosophy together since they met, which is to say more or less since either of them encountered the subject. They test ideas on each other; they criticize each...