15 Facts About Patricia Churchland

1.

Patricia Smith Churchland was born on 16 July 1943 and is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind.

2.

Patricia Churchland is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught since 1984.

3.

Patricia Churchland has held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989.

4.

Patricia Churchland is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University.

5.

Patricia Churchland's mother was a nurse and her father worked in newspaper publishing in addition to running the family farm.

6.

In spite of their limited education, Patricia Churchland has described her parents as interested in the sciences, and the worldview they instilled in her as a secular one.

7.

Patricia Churchland has described her parents as eager for her to attend college, and though many farmers in their community thought this "hilarious and a grotesque waste of money", they saw to it that she did so.

8.

Patricia Churchland took her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, graduating with honors in 1965.

9.

Patricia Churchland's first academic appointment was at the University of Manitoba, where she was an assistant professor from 1969 to 1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1982, and promoted to a full professorship in 1983.

10.

At the Salk Institute, Patricia Churchland has worked with Terrence Sejnowski's lab as a research collaborator.

11.

Patricia Churchland attended and was a speaker at the secularist Beyond Belief symposia in 2006,2007, and 2008.

12.

Patricia Churchland is considered an atheist, however she identified herself as pantheist in a 2012 interview.

13.

Patricia Churchland is broadly allied to a view of philosophy as a kind of 'proto-science' - asking challenging but largely empirical questions.

14.

Patricia Churchland applies findings from neuroscience to address traditional philosophical questions about knowledge, free will, consciousness and ethics.

15.

Patricia Churchland is associated with a school of thought called eliminative materialism, which argues that common sense, immediately intuitive, or "folk psychological" concepts such as thought, free will, and consciousness will likely need to be revised in a physically reductionistic way as neuroscientists discover more about the nature of brain function.