Patricia Churchland

Patricia Churchland is a Canadian-American analytical philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught since 1984. Her work is allied to a view of philosophy as a kind of 'proto-science', which asks challenging but largely empirical questions, and her approach to philosophy is practical, applied and integrated with science. Patricia Churchland is associated with a school of thought called eliminative materialism - she believes philosophers are increasingly realising that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. She applies findings from neuroscience to address traditional philosophical questions about knowledge, free will, consciousness and ethics.