Churchland was born Patricia Smith in Oliver, British Columbia,[3] and raised on a farm in the South Okanagan valley.[9][10] Both of her parents lacked a high-school education; her father and mother left school after grades 6 and 8 respectively. Her mother was a nurse and her father worked in newspaper publishing in addition to running the family farm. In spite of their limited education, Churchland has described her parents as interested in the sciences, and the worldview they instilled in her as a secular one. She has also 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.[10] She took her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, graduating with honors in 1965.[7] She received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at the University of Pittsburgh, where she took an M.A. in 1966.[7][11] Thereafter she studied at Somerville College, Oxford as a British Council and Canada Council Fellow, obtaining a B. Phil in 1969.[7]
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.[7] It was here that she began to make a formal study of neuroscience with the help and encouragement of Larry Jordan, a professor with a lab in the Department of Physiology there.[9][10][12] From 1982 to 1983 she was a Visiting Member in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[13] In 1984, she was invited to take up a professorship in the department of philosophy at UCSD, and relocated there with her husband Paul, where both have remained since.[14] Since 1989, she has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute adjacent to UCSD's campus, where she became acquainted with Jonas Salk[4][9] whose name the Institute bears. Describing Salk, Churchland has said that he "liked the idea of neurophilosophy, and he gave me a tremendous amount of encouragement at a time when many other people thought that we were, frankly, out to lunch."[10] Another important supporter Churchland found at the Salk Institute was Francis Crick.[9][10] At the Salk Institute, Churchland has worked with Terrence Sejnowski's lab as a research collaborator.[15] Her collaboration with Sejnowski culminated in a book, The Computational Brain (MIT Press, 1993), co-authored with Sejnowski. Churchland was named the UC President's Professor of Philosophy in 1999, and served as Chair of the Philosophy Department at UCSD from 2000-2007.[7]
Churchland is broadly allied to a view of philosophy as a kind of 'proto-science' - asking challenging but largely empirical questions. She advocates the scientific endeavour, and has dismissed significant swathes of professional philosophy as obsessed with what she regards as unnecessary.[24]
Churchland's own work has focused on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. According to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing 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. She 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.[25]
2014 saw a brief exchange of views on these topics with Colin McGinn in the pages of the New York Review Of Books.[26]
^ abDummett, Michael (2010). The Nature and Future of Philosophy. Columbia University Press. p. 33. A small number of analytic philosophers–notoriously the two Churchlands–treat the absence of any detailed correspondence [between specific mental occurrences and particular events in the brain] as an objection not to the thesis of mind/brain identity, but to reliance on our familiar mental constructs.
^ abSmith, Quentin (1997). Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. Yale University Press. pp. 93–94. [The postpositivist physicalism of philosophers such as the Churchlands and linguistic essentialism were the] "...two main movements of analytic philosophy of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s; no other analytic movement even compares with them in influence and acceptance."
^"Social Science Only". A Community of Scholars. Princeton, NJ: Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 19 March 2012. Retrieved 30 August 2011. Churchland, Patricia Smith [V] SocSci 1982-83
^Churchland, Paul M. (19 January 2007). "Curriculum Vitae"(PDF). UCSD Philosophy Department. Retrieved 30 August 2011.
^"CNL - People"(web page). Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. The Salk Institute. Retrieved 30 August 2011.
^Todd, Douglas (February 4, 2012). "Pat Churchland fights for supremacy of the brain". Vancouver Sun. Retrieved 2021-05-04. When I asked her how she would define herself on the spiritual-philosophical spectrum, however, she surprisingly answered: "Pantheist," adding "I love nature." Pantheists are defined as people who view the natural world as the absolute, as the equivalent of God."
