Paul Churchland

Paul Churchland ( born October 21, 1942) is a teaching at the University of California at San Diego Canadian philosopher. He is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland. His main area of ​​work is in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of neuroscience.

Paul Churchland has become known as the representative of eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialists hold folk psychological terms like " belief " or " sensation " 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.

Writings

• Plato 's Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals, MIT Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0262016865.
• The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, MIT Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0262531429.
• The soul machine. A philosophical journey into the brain. Berlin, Oxford University Press. 1995
• A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science, MIT Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0262531061.
• Images of Science: Scientific Realism versus Constructive Empiricism, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press, 1984.
• Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1979.