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Description
Philosopher Paul Churchland, currently nearing the end of his second decade in resistance at the University of California, San Diego, has long been what is often quite rare: a cutting-edge academic philosopher. He as been at the vanguard (alongside his wife, Patricia Churchland) of "Neurophilosophy," the attempt to draw philosophical lessons from the burgeoning neural sciences. He has advocated taking a "neurocomputational perspective" on long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics (in particular, the mind-body problem), and even ethics. For many decades now, he has been the foremost proponent of the philosophical position known as "Eliminative Materialism," the thesis that our commonsense psychological understanding of ourselves could be, and further very likely is, radically mistaken; that our naive concepts, of such things as "beliefs" and "desires," ought to be relegated to the dustbin of science history, alongside phlogiston and the geocentric solar system. Instead, he proposes replacing them with new concepts drawn from computational neuroscience. Professor Brian Keeley, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pitzer College, will show how Churchland's "new" and "radical" ideas grew quite naturally out of the more "traditional" philosophers who influenced him. What is new in Churchland is, in fact, not the individual theses that make up his worldview, but rather his unique way of combining and relating these ideas to one another. This lecture will draw upon a paper in the forthcoming book, Paul Churchland, which Professor Keeley is editing for the Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series from Cambridge University Press.
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