| Full name | Patricia Smith Churchland |
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| Born | July 16, 1943 Oliver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Era | 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic Philosophy |
| Main interests | Neurophilosophy Philosophy of mind Philosophy of science Medical and environmental ethics |
| Notable ideas | Neurophilosophy, Eliminative Materialism |
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Patricia Smith Churchland (born July 16, 1943 in Oliver, British Columbia, Canada) is a Canadian-American philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She has been a Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) since 1984. Since 1999 she has been UC President's Professor of Philosophy at UCSD, and has held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989.[1] Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is the wife of philosopher Paul Churchland.[2]
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Churchland was born Patricia Smith in Oliver, British Columbia, and raised on a farm there in the South Okanagan valley.[3][4] 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.[4] She took her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, graduating with honors in 1965.[2] She received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at the University of Pittsburgh, where she took an M.A. in 1966.[2][5] Thereafter she studied at Oxford University as a British Council and Canada Council Fellow, obtaining a B. Phil in 1969.[2]
Churchland's first academic appointment was at the University of Manitoba, where she was an assistant professor from 1969–1977, an associate professor from 1977–1982, and promoted to a full professorship in 1983.[2] 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.[3][4][6] From 1982-1983 she was a Visiting Member in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[7] 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.[8] Since 1989, she has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute adjacent to UCSD's campus, where she became acquainted with the institute's founder and namesake Jonas Salk.[1][3] 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."[4] Another important supporter Churchland found at the Salk Institute was Francis Crick.[3][4] At the Salk Institute, Churchland has worked with Terrence Sejnowski's lab as a research collaborator.[9] 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.[2]
She attended and was a speaker at the secularist Beyond Belief symposia in 2006, 2007, and 2008.[10] [11] [12]
Churchland first met her husband, the philosopher Paul Churchland, while they were both enrolled in a class on Plato at the University of Pittsburgh,[4] and they were married after she completed her B.phil at Oxford University.[3] Their children are Mark M. Churchland (born 1972) and Anne K. Churchland (born 1974), both of whom are neuroscientists.[13][14]
Churchland 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 is associated with a school of thought called eliminative materialism, which argues that commonsense, 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.[15]
In addition to her own work, Patricia Churchland and her husband Paul have been the subjects of several philosophical review works, including:
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