Born, raised and college educated in New York City, Graham did graduate work in Canada and in Boston.  He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1975.  Before joining the faculty at Georgia State University in Fall 2008, he taught at UAB (Alabama-Birmingham), chairing its philosophy department, and at Wake Forest University, where he was the first holder of the A. C. Reid Professorship in Philosophy.  Graham has been a visiting scholar at Princeton and at St. Andrews (Scotland) and has guest lectured at such universities as Duke, Emory, Texas, UCSD, Virginia Tech, Washington University St. Louis, and the University of the West Indies.

Graham is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Over the course of his research career he has authored or co-authored dozens of articles, in such journals as Nous, Philosophical Quarterly, and Synthese.  He has produced as either author, co-author or co-editor ten books for such presses as Blackwell, MIT Press, and Oxford University Press.  Currently he is completing a book for Routledge on the philosophy of mind and mental illness, entitled The Disordered Mind, will be published in March, 2010. Over the course of his teaching career he has taught more than two dozen sorts of courses, some on mind, some on topics in recent philosophy, and some on interdisciplinary topics, spanning such disciplines as anthropology, religion, psychiatry, and neuroscience.