Patricia Churchland
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Patricia Smith Churchland (born 16 July 1943) is a Canadian-American analytical philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989.
Philosophical work
Churchland is broadly allied to a view of philosophy as a kind of 'proto-science' - asking challenging but largely empirical questions. She advocates an approach that is practical, applied and integrated with the scientific endeavour, and has dismissed significant swathes of professional philosophy as obsessed with what she regards as unnecessary, fine-grained distinctions, producing "isms up the ying yang".
Churchland's own work has focused on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. According to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. She applies findings from neuroscience to address traditional philosophical questions about knowledge, free will, consciousness and ethics. She is associated with a school of thought called eliminative materialism, which argues that common sense, immediately intuitive, or "folk psychological" concepts such as thought, free will, and consciousness will likely need to be revised in a physically reductionistic way as neuroscientists discover more about the nature of brain function.
See also
- American philosophy
- Eliminative materialism
- Neurophilosophy
- List of American philosophers
- Materialism
- Monism
- Philosophy of mind
- Reductionism
- Scientism
