Professor Clark (BA, DPhil, Stirling) was appointed to the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in 2004, where he currently teaches. Prior to that he had taught at the University of Glasgow, the University of Sussex, Washington University in St Louis, and Indiana University, Bloomington. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University.

He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2015, and is credited with having co-created the extended mind hypothesis, an important theory in cognitive science and philosophy which claims the mind is not contained within the brain or body, but is in part literally constituted by the environment in which it finds itself. He works primarily within the philosophy of mind, and has also written extensively on connectionism and robotics within artificial intelligence.