Patricia Churchland

Patricia Smith Churchland (born 16 July 1943) is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher known for founding neurophilosophy and reshaping the philosophy of mind. She is a UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught since 1984, and has been an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She also sits on the board of trustees for the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies at Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Churchland grew up on a farm in British Columbia’s South Okanagan valley. Neither parent finished high school—her father left after grade six, her mother after grade eight—but both valued science and a secular worldview. Despite neighbors who thought college a waste of money, they pushed her to attend. She earned an honors undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia in 1965, a master’s from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 (via a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship), and a B.Phil from Somerville College, Oxford in 1969 (as a British Council and Canada Council Fellow).

She began her academic career at the University of Manitoba, rising from assistant professor (1969–1977) to associate professor (1977–1982) to full professor (1983). There, with encouragement from physiologist Larry Jordan, she formally studied neuroscience. After a year as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1982–1983), she moved to UCSD in 1984, where her husband, philosopher Paul Churchland, also joined the faculty. At the Salk Institute, she worked with Terrence Sejnowski’s lab, co-authoring *The Computational Brain* (MIT Press, 1993). She became UC President’s Professor of Philosophy in 1999 and chaired UCSD’s philosophy department from 2000 to 2007. She spoke at the secular Beyond Belief symposia in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

Her philosophy treats the discipline as a kind of proto-science, focused on empirical questions. She has dismissed large parts of professional philosophy as obsessed with unnecessary problems. Her work bridges neuroscience and philosophy, arguing that understanding the mind requires understanding the brain. She applies neuroscience to questions about knowledge, free will, consciousness, and ethics, and is a key figure in eliminative materialism—the view that folk-psychological concepts like thought and consciousness will likely be revised as brain science progresses. In 2014, she debated these ideas with Colin McGinn in the *New York Review of Books*.

She met Paul Churchland in a Plato class at the University of Pittsburgh; they married after her Oxford degree. Their children, Mark (born 1972) and Anne (born 1974), are both neuroscientists. Churchland is an atheist, though she identified as a pantheist in a 2012 interview. The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar noted that the couple’s work is so similar they are sometimes discussed as one person.

Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (1991), Humanist Laureate (1993), honorary doctorates from the University of Virginia (1996) and the University of Alberta (2007), and being named Distinguished Cognitive Scientist at UC Merced (2011). She is also a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society (2011). Her books include *Neurophilosophy* (1986) and *Brain-Wise*.