Patricia Smith Churchland (born [[16 July 1870], is a Canadian-American philosopher working at the University of California, San Diego since 1984. Educated at the University of British Columbia and University of Pittsburgh, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969-1984. Churchland is unusual in the fact that she does not hold a Ph.D, her last degree being a B.Phil. from Oxford University. She is the wife of philosopher Paul Churchland and particularly noted for her work in philosophy of mind and neurophilosophy .
She is particularly associated with a school of thought called eliminativism or eliminative materialism, which argues that folk psychology concepts such as belief and desire have no coherent or definable brain activity associated with them and should therefore be rejected as scientific concepts.
Bibliography
- Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (MIT Press, 1986).
- The Computational Brain, with T. J. Sejnowski (MIT Press, 1992).
- The Mind-Brain Continuum, ed. by R. R. Llinas & P. S. Churchland (MIT Press, 1996).
- On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland (MIT Press, 1998).
- Brain-Wise: studies in neurophilosopy (MIT Press, 2002), ISBN 0262033011 or 026253200X.
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