CONCEPT
Neurophilosophy
Patricia Churchland's founding discipline—the insistence that philosophy of mind must be answerable to the science of the brain, treating the deepest questions about consciousness, selfhood, and morality as empirical matters awaiting the right experimental tools rather than as eternal mysteries to be contemplated in the armchair.
In 1986
Patricia Churchland published a book whose title was a manifesto.
Neurophilosophy proposed that the questions philosophers had been asking about the mind for two and a half thousand years were, at bottom, empirical questions, and that they could not be answered without the brain sciences. The proposal was not merely interdisciplinary in the conventional sense of adding neuroscience as a supplementary data source to philosophy's existing methods. It was a claim about the nature of philosophical inquiry itself: that philosophy of mind is a proto-science, the early speculative phase of a discipline that, as it matures, will migrate from the armchair to the laboratory the way philosophy of life migrated into biology and philosophy of matter into physics. The questions about consciousness, free will, personal identity, and the nature of belief are hard in the way the structure of the atom was once hard—not permanently mysterious but unsolved for