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Paul Churchland Quotes

born 1942 Canada

Paul Churchland (born October 21, 1942) is a Canadian philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind.

Canada
Academics
Philosophers

Random Paul Churchland quote

8 quotes

The curiosity of Man, and the cunning of his reason, have revealed much of what Nature held hidden.

We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain.

Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind.

Your brain is far too complex and mercurial for its behavior to be predicted in any but the broadest outlines or for any but the shortest distances in the future.

Paul M. Churchland (1996)

You and I have a confidence that most people lack ... We think we can continue to be liberals and still move this forward.

The basic idea is that cognitive activities are ultimately just activities of the nervous system; and if one wants to understand the activities of the nervous system, then the best way to gain that understanding is to examine the nervous system itself.

p. 96; As cited in: Peter Zachar (2000)

Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.

p. 67; As cited in: Paul K. Mose (2002)

How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness... – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Churchland (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.