 She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was a student of Ferdinand Alquié, and the University of Helsinki, where she was a student of Ingmar Pörn and Georg Henrik von Wright.In the 1980s she taught at the University of Pittsburgh in the US and in Helsinki before being named professor of philosophy at Uppsala University in 1997.In her critically received book on Descartes (2003), Alanen goes beyond mere history, drawing out the historical antecedents and the intellectual evolution of Descartes' thinking about the mind, showing how his emphasis on the embodiment of the mind has implications far more complex and interesting than the usual dualist account associated with his thinking suggests.