Patricia Churchland b. 1943

Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher, professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the founders of the field she named neurophilosophy. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain argued that the categories of folk psychology must be revised in the light of mature neuroscience, while Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality and Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition have defended a naturalistic account of human morality grounded in the neurobiology of attachment and care. With her husband Paul she has been the most influential proponent of eliminative materialism in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Patricia Smith Churchland was born at Oliver in the interior of British Columbia in July 1943, the daughter of farmers. She took her bachelor's at the University of British Columbia in 1965, her bachelor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 (where she worked closely with Wilfrid Sellars), and her bachelor of philosophy at Oxford in 1969. She taught at the University of Manitoba from 1969, where she sat in on neuroanatomy classes at the medical school, and from 1984 has been at the University of California, San Diego, as President's Professor of Philosophy and adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991.

Her books are Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (1986), The Computational Brain (1992, with Terrence Sejnowski), Brain-Wise (2002), Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (2011), Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves (2013), and Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition (2019).

Churchland, with her husband Paul Churchland, founded neurophilosophy as a sustained programme of taking the neurosciences as the proper basis for philosophy of mind, defending eliminative materialism about folk-psychological categories and arguing that morality is the natural extension of mammalian caregiving systems shaped by oxytocin and the social circuits of the brain. She is one of the principal architects of the contemporary turn from armchair philosophy of mind to integrated cognitive neuroscience.