Patricia Churchland

Patricia Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland (born 16 July 1943) is a Canadian-American analytic 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. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."
Biography
Early life and education
Churchland was born Patricia Smith in Oliver, British Columbia, and raised on a farm in the South Okanagan valley. Both of her parents lacked a high-school education; her father and mother left school after grades 6 and 8 respectively. Her mother was a nurse and her father worked in newspaper publishing in addition to running the family farm. In spite of their limited education, Churchland has described her parents as interested in the sciences, and the worldview they instilled in her as a secular one. She has also described her parents as eager for her to attend college, and though many farmers in their community thought this "hilarious and a grotesque waste of money", they saw to it that she did so. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, graduating with honors in 1965. She received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at the University of Pittsburgh, where she took an M.A. in 1966. Thereafter she studied at Somerville College, Oxford as a British Council and Canada Council Fellow, obtaining a B. Phil in 1969.
Academic career
Churchland's first academic appointment was at the University of Manitoba, where she was an assistant professor from 1969 to 1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1982, and promoted to a full professorship in 1983. It was here that she began to make a formal study of neuroscience with the help and encouragement of Larry Jordan, a professor with a lab in the Department of Physiology there. From 1982 to 1983 she was a Visiting Member in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1984, she was invited to take up a professorship in the department of philosophy at UCSD, and relocated there with her husband Paul, where both have remained since. Since 1989, she has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute adjacent to UCSD's campus, where she became acquainted with Jonas Salk whose name the Institute bears. Describing Salk, Churchland has said that he "liked the idea of neurophilosophy, and he gave me a tremendous amount of encouragement at a time when many other people thought that we were, frankly, out to lunch." Another important supporter Churchland found at the Salk Institute was Francis Crick. At the Salk Institute, Churchland has worked with Terrence Sejnowski's lab as a research collaborator. Her collaboration with Sejnowski culminated in a book, The Computational Brain (MIT Press, 1993), co-authored with Sejnowski. Churchland was named the UC President's Professor of Philosophy in 1999, and served as Chair of the Philosophy Department at UCSD from 2000-2007.
She attended and was a speaker at the secularist Beyond Belief symposia in 2006, 2007, and 2008.
Personal life
Churchland first met her husband, the philosopher Paul Churchland, while they were both enrolled in a class on Plato at the University of Pittsburgh, and they were married after she completed her B.Phil at Somerville College, Oxford. Their children are Mark M. Churchland (born 1972) and Anne K. Churchland (born 1974), both of whom are neuroscientists. Churchland is considered an atheist, however she identified herself as pantheist in a 2012 interview.
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 the scientific endeavour, and has dismissed significant swathes of professional philosophy as obsessed with what she regards as unnecessary.
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.
2014 saw a brief exchange of views on these topics with Colin McGinn in the pages of the New York Review Of Books.
Awards and honors
MacArthur Fellowship, 1991
Humanist Laureate, International Academy of Humanism, 1993
Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of Virginia, 1996
Honorary Doctor of Law, University of Alberta, 2007
Distinguished Cognitive Scientist, UC, Merced Cognitive and Information Sciences program, 2011
Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, 2011
Works
As sole author
Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. (1986) Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
"The Hornswoggle Problem". (1996) San Diego, La Jolla, CA. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. (2002) Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. (2011) Princeton University Press. eBook
Touching A Nerve: The Self As Brain. (2013) W. W. Norton & Company.
Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition. (2019) W. W. Norton & Company.
As co-author or editor
The Computational Brain. (1992) Patricia S. Churchland and T. J. Sejnowski. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Neurophilosophy and Alzheimer's Disease. (1992) Edited by Y. Christen and Patricia S. Churchland. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
The Mind-Brain Continuum (1996). Edited by R.R. Llinás and Patricia S. Churchland: The MIT Press.
On the Contrary: Critical Essays 1987-1997. (1998). Paul M. Churchland and Patricia S. Churchland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
See also
American philosophy
Eliminative materialism
Neurophilosophy
List of American philosophers
Materialism
Monism
Philosophy of mind
Reductionism
Scientism
References
Further reading
The Churchlands and Their Critics. (1996) Robert N. McCauley. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell
On the Churchlands. (2004) William Hirstein. Florence, Kentucky: Thomson Wadsworth
External links
Personal Homepage
Interviewed on NOUS the podcast 'On How We Evolved A Conscience'
"Philosophy of Brain - A Conversation with Patricia Churchland", Ideas Roadshow, 2014
Pat Churchland interviews with Philosophy Bites on Self Control, on Eliminative Materialism, and on What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Morality (audio)
How your brain invents morality Patricia Churchland interviewed by Sigal Samuel on 'her theory of how we evolved a conscience' for Vox (2019).
1943 births
Living people
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American philosophers
Analytic philosophers
Canadian expatriate academics in the United States
Canadian philosophers
American women philosophers
American neuroscientists
American women neuroscientists
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
MacArthur Fellows
Materialists
Philosophers of mind
Pantheists
Academic staff of the University of Manitoba
University of California, San Diego faculty
University of Pittsburgh alumni
University of British Columbia alumni
Canadian women philosophers
Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
Salk Institute for Biological Studies people
Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford
20th-century American women
21st-century American women