Patricia Churchland

Patricia Churchland (2015)

Patricia Smith Churchland (born July 16, 1943 in Oliver , British Columbia ) is a Canadian philosopher . She is the wife of the philosopher Paul Churchland and works mainly in the fields of philosophy of mind and neurophilosophy . Another area of ​​research is neuroethics .

Life

Patricia Churchland studied at the University of British Columbia , University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oxford and taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984. Since 1984 she has been a professor at the University of California in San Diego , and in 2013 she retired .

Churchland has become known as a representative of eliminative materialism . Eliminative materialists consider everyday psychological terms such as “belief” or “sensation” to be incoherent. Such concepts are not compatible with neuroscientific knowledge. They could also be replaced by neuroscientific terminology.

The Churchlands also use analogies from the history of science to argue for eliminative materialism . In the course of scientific advances it was found that certain entities simply do not exist (such as witches or phlogistons ). In the course of neuroscientific advances one has to realize that there are no mental states either, only neuronal states.

In 1991 she was a MacArthur Fellow . In 2015 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

literature

• Neurophilosophy : Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (MIT Press, 1986). ISBN 0-262-53085-6
• The Computational Brain , with Terrence J. Sejnowski (MIT Press, 1992). ISBN 0-262-53120-8
• The Mind-Brain Continuum , ed. By Rodolfo R. Llinas & PS Churchland (MIT Press, 1996). ISBN 0-262-12198-0
• On the Contrary , with Paul M. Churchland (MIT Press, 1998). ISBN 0-262-53165-8
• Brain-Wise : studies in neurophilosophy (MIT Press, 2002), ISBN 0-262-03301-1 or ISBN 0-262-53200-X .
• Brain trust . What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2011, ISBN 978-0-691-13703-2 .
• Touching a nerve . The Self as Brain. WW Norton & Company, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-393-05832-1 .
• Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition . WW Norton & Company, New York 2019, ISBN 978-1-324-00089-1 .

Web links

Commons : Patricia Churchland  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Patricia Churchland in the catalog of the German National Library
• personal homepage - English
• Entry "Patricia Churchland" in the Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind - English
• Portrait of The Vancouver Sun (Engl.)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Faculty. University of California, San Diego , Department of Philosophy, accessed July 1, 2016 . 
2. ^ Career. Patricia Churchland, accessed July 1, 2016 .