Patricia Smith Churchland B. Phil

Patricia Smith Churchland is emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. She has a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Her curiosity about the philosophical implications of advances in brain science matured when she was a junior professor at the University of Manitoba. Aided by a Woodrow Wilson Faculty Development Grant (1975-76), she studied neurology at the University of Manitoba Medical School, and learned basic neuroscience in the Jordan spinal cord lab. She and her colleague-husband, Paul Churchland, came to UCSD in 1984, where she pioneered the subfield of neurophilosophy. Churchland has been president of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991. She is the author of books including Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain and Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition.

Extended interviews can be found on The Science Network and Philosophy Bites, and in "Two Heads" by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.