| Full name | Paul Churchland |
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| Born | October 21, 1942 |
| Era | 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic Philosophy |
| Main interests | Neurophilosophy Philosophy of science Philosophy of mind Artificial intelligence Epistemology |
| Notable ideas | Eliminative Materialism |
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Paul Churchland (born Oct. 21, 1942, Vancouver, B.C., Canada) is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind.[1] He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy.[2] Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and the Institute for Neural Computation.[3] He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars.[4] Churchland is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland. He is also the father of two children, Mark and Anne Churchland, both of whom are neuroscientists.[5][6][7]
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Churchland began his professional career as an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969;[8] he also lectured at the University of Toronto from 1967-69.[9] In 1969, Churchland took a position at the University of Manitoba, where he would teach for fifteen years: as an assistant professor (69 - 74) and associate professor (74 - 79), and then as a full professor from 1979 - 1984.[10] Professor Churchland joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1982, staying as a member until 1983.[11] He joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1983, serving as Department Chair from 1986 - 1990.[12]
Churchland has supervised a number of PhD students, including Matthew Brown (now at UT Dallas), P.D. Magnus (now at the University at Albany), Philip Brey (now at the University of Twente).
Along with his wife, Churchland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism, which claims that everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings, and desires are part of a "folk psychology" of theoretical constructs without coherent definition, destined to simply be obviated by a thoroughly scientific understanding of human nature.
Just as modern science has discarded such notions as luck or witchcraft, Churchland argues that a future, fully matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs" or "feelings" (see propositional attitudes), and that even consciousness and personal identity are suspect. Such concepts will not merely be reduced to more finely grained explanation and retained as useful proximate levels of description, but will be strictly eliminated as wholly lacking in correspondence to precise objective phenomena, such as activation patterns across neural networks. He points out that the history of science has seen many posits once considered real entities, such as phlogiston, caloric, the luminiferous ether, and vital forces, thus eliminated. In "The Engine of Reason" Churchland hypothesizes that consciousness might be explained in terms of a recurrent neural network with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He says his proposal is probably mistaken in the neurological details, but on the right track in its use of recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This is notably a reductionist rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.
Professor Churchland has authored eight books in philosophy, which have been translated into ten different languages.
Of his books, Matter and Consciousness has been the most frequently and extensively reprinted.[13] Both Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind and A Neurocomputational Perspective have also been reprinted.[14]
Professor Churchland has written a number of published articles that have had a substantial impact in philosophy. His essays have been translated into six different languages.
Each of these selected articles has been reprinted at least four times. Churchland's most famous essay is his 1981 Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Published in a leading journal, this essay has been reprinted over twenty times and translated into five languages.