Paul M. Churchland

Paul Churchland

In Matter and Consciousness, Paul Churchland clearly presents theadvantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism,reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates thestriking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificialintelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophicalissues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimentalresults of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this researchbears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and theirimplementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform somecognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Mostsignificant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to thereductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. A BradfordBook

A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Matter and Consciousness

Churchland explores the unfolding impact of the several empirical sciences of the mind, especially cognitive neurobiology and computational neuroscience on a variety of traditional issues central to the discipline of philosophy. Representing Churchland's most recent research, they continue his research program, launched over thirty years ago which has evolved into the field of neurophilosophy. Topics such as the nature of Consciousness, the nature of cognition and intelligence, the nature of moral knowledge and moral reasoning, neurosemantics or world-representation in the brain, the nature of our subjective sensory qualia and their relation to objective science, and the future of philosophy itself are here addressed in a lively, graphical, and accessible manner. Throughout the volume, Churchland's view that science is as important as philosophy is emphasised. Several of the color figures in the volume will allow the reader to perform some novel phenomenological experiments on his/her own visual system.

Paul Churchland

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