Patricia Churchland

Patricia Smith Churchland was born July 16, 1943, in Oliver, British Columbia, and is a Canadian American philosopher known for pioneering the field of neurophilosophy within the philosophy of mind. She has taught at the University of California, San Diego since 1984, where she now holds the title UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita, and has held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. Her work integrates neuroscientific findings directly into philosophical inquiry, on the premise that understanding the mind requires understanding the brain, and she is closely associated with eliminative materialism, the position that common sense psychological concepts will need substantial revision as neuroscience advances. She earned degrees from the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh and Somerville College, Oxford, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. She is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland.