Patricia Churchland

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

Patricia Churchland studied at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Pittsburgh and taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba By 1969 until 1984. Since 1984 she teaches at the University of California at San Diego.

Churchland has become known as the representative of eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialists hold folk psychological concepts such as " faith " or " feelings " for incoherent. Such terms are not consistent with the neuroscientific findings. Moreover, they could be replaced by a neuro- scientific terminology.

The Churchlands argue for the eliminative materialism by means of analogies from the history of science. You had to find in the course of scientific progress, that it simply does not exist certain entities (such as witches or phlogiston ). In the course of neuroscientific progress must find that there are no mental states, but only neural states.

In 1991, she was MacArthur Fellow.