PATRICIA CHURCHLAND

BACKGROUND AND LIFE EXPERIENCED

- Born in July 16,1943(78 yrs old)
- Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian philosopher who has been a leading
advocate of the neurobiological approach to understanding human consciousness,
ethics, and free will.
- Teaching at the University of California, San Diego, since 1984, she has been a
leader in the interdisciplinary project of combining psychology, philosophy, and
neuroscience in research on the mind.

- Churchland earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of British Columbia in 1965 and
then a master’s at the University of Pittsburgh the next year.
- She attended Oxford University, where she completed a B.Phil. in 1969. She began her
teaching career at the University of Manitoba, and in 1982 spent a year as a visiting member of
the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
- After moving to San Diego, she became an adjunct professor in 1989 at the nearby Salk
Institute and since 1999 has been the University of California President’s Professor of
Philosophy.
- She has received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Victoria in 1996 and an
Honorary Doctor of Law from the University of Alberta.
BOOKS
- Churchland’s first book was Neurophilosophy (1986), which presented the case for an
interdisciplinary approach to questions about how the mind represents, reasons, decides, and
perceives.
-Patricia Churchland is the doyenne of neurophilosophers. She believes, as I do, that to
understand the mind, one must understand the brain, using evidence from neuroscience to
refine concepts such as free will.Our conscious selves inhabit the world of ideas; our brains, the
world of objects.
- For years, she’s been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel
empathy and other moral intuitions? What’s the origin of that nagging little voice that we call
our conscience?
- In her new book, Conscience, Churchland argues that mammals and humans but also
monkeys and rodents and so on, feel moral intuitions because of how our brains developed
over the course of evolution.
- Conscience, to her, is not a set of absolute moral truths, but a set of community norms that
evolved because they were useful. “Tell the truth” and “keep your promises,” for example.
- On first impulse, the word “conscience” seems most easily defined as an innate knowledge of
right and wrong. But if we think about the term more deeply, questions quickly arise. For
instance, what one group defines as “right” is readily dismissed by another as “wrong.”
- Patricia Churchland has written an eye-opening book that may seriously challenge everything
we thought we knew about our best behavior.
- She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate,
and to care. She shows how children grow up in society to learn, through repetition and rewards, the norms,
values, and behavior that their parents embrace.

PHYLOSOPHY

For decades, Patricia Churchland has contributed to the fields of philosophy of neuroscience,
philosophy of the mind and neuroethics.
She believes “ To understand the mind, we must to understand the brain”
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Churchland then turns to philosophy―that of Socrates, Aquinas, and contemporary thinkers
like Owen Flanagan―to explore why morality is central to all societies, how it is transmitted
through the generations, and why different cultures live by different morals. Her unparalleled
ability to join ideas rarely put into dialogue brings light to a subject that speaks to the meaning
of being human.