"These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for admonishing them that a person who wants to think seriously about the mind-body problem has to pay attention to the brain. But this acknowledgment is not always extended to Pat herself, or to the work she does now. “Although some of Churchland’s views have taken root in mainstream philosophy, she is not part of it,” Ned Block, a philosopher at New York University, wrote in a review of one of her books. “Unfortunately, Churchland . . . approaches many conceptual issues in the sciences of the mind like the more antiphilosophical of scientists.” Although she tried to ignore it, Pat was wounded by this review. But it was true; in some ways she had simply left the field. Although she often talks to scientists, she says she hasn’t got around to giving a paper to a philosophy department in five years. These days, she often feels that the philosophical debate over consciousness is more or less a waste of time."
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Philosophers from CanadaMacArthur FellowsNeuroscientistsWomen academics from CanadaPeople from British Columbia
Original Language: English
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Sources
Larissa MacFarquhar, "Two heads: A marriage devoted to the mind-body problem", The New Yorker (2007)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland
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Patricia Churchland
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