Patricia Churchland | |
|---|---|
.jpg) | |
| Born | Patricia Smith (1943-07-16)July 16, 1943 (age 82) Oliver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Spouse | Paul Churchland |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | University of British Columbia University of Pittsburgh Somerville College, Oxford |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-/21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy[1][2] |
| Main interests | Neurophilosophy Philosophy of mind Philosophy of science Medical andenvironmental ethics |
| Notable ideas | Neurophilosophy,Eliminative Materialism |
Patricia Smith Churchland (born 16 July 1943)[3] is a Canadian-Americananalyticphilosopher[1][2] noted for her contributions toneurophilosophy and thephilosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at theUniversity of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at theSalk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989.[4] She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department,Moscow State University.[5] In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts & Sciences.[6] Educated at theUniversity of British Columbia, theUniversity of Pittsburgh, andSomerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at theUniversity of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopherPaul Churchland.[7]Larissa MacFarquhar, writing forThe 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."[8]
Churchland was born Patricia Smith inOliver, British Columbia,[3] and raised on a farm in theSouth Okanagan valley.[9][10] 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.[10] She took her undergraduate degree at theUniversity of British Columbia, graduating withhonors in 1965.[7] She received aWoodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at theUniversity of Pittsburgh, where she took anM.A. in 1966.[7][11] Thereafter she studied atSomerville College, Oxford as aBritish Council andCanada Council Fellow, obtaining aB. Phil in 1969.[7]
Churchland's first academic appointment was at theUniversity 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.[7] It was here that she began to make a formal study ofneuroscience with the help and encouragement of Larry Jordan, a professor with a lab in the Department of Physiology there.[9][10][12] From 1982 to 1983 she was a Visiting Member in Social Science at theInstitute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[13] In 1984, she was invited to take up a professorship in the department of philosophy atUCSD, and relocated there with her husband Paul, where both have remained since.[14] Since 1989, she has also held an adjunct professorship at theSalk Institute adjacent to UCSD's campus, where she became acquainted withJonas Salk[4][9] 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."[10] Another important supporter Churchland found at the Salk Institute wasFrancis Crick.[9][10] At the Salk Institute, Churchland has worked withTerrence Sejnowski's lab as a research collaborator.[15] 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.[7]
She attended and was a speaker at thesecularistBeyond Belief symposia in 2006, 2007, and 2008.[16][17][18]
Churchland first met her husband, the philosopherPaul Churchland, while they were both enrolled in a class on Plato at theUniversity of Pittsburgh,[10] and they were married after she completed her B.Phil atSomerville College, Oxford.[9] Their children are Mark M. Churchland (born 1972) andAnne K. Churchland (born 1974), both of whom are neuroscientists.[19][20] Churchland is considered anatheist,[21] but she identified herself aspantheist in a 2012 interview.[22][23]
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.[24]
Churchland's own work has focused on the interface betweenneuroscience 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 calledeliminative materialism, which argues that common sense, immediately intuitive, or "folk psychological" concepts such asthought,free will, andconsciousness will likely need to be revised in a physicallyreductionistic way as neuroscientists discover more about the nature of brain function.[25]2014 saw a brief exchange of views on these topics withColin McGinn in the pages of theNew York Review Of Books.[26]
A small number of analytic philosophers–notoriously the two Churchlands–treat the absence of any detailed correspondence [between specific mental occurrences and particular events in the brain] as an objection not to the thesis of mind/brain identity, but to reliance on our familiar mental constructs.
[The postpositivist physicalism of philosophers such as the Churchlands and linguistic essentialism were the] "...two main movements of analytic philosophy of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s; no other analytic movement even compares with them in influence and acceptance."
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Churchland, Patricia Smith [V] SocSci 1982-83
...another atheist writer, the philosopher Patricia Churchland...
When I asked her how she would define herself on the spiritual-philosophical spectrum, however, she surprisingly answered: "Pantheist," adding "I love nature." Pantheists are defined as people who view the natural world as the absolute, as the equivalent of God."
{{cite magazine}}:Cite magazine requires|magazine= (help)
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