Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and the Institute for Neural Computation. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars.Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy.Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and the Institute for Neural Computation. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars.

Churchland's current research interests lie in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and cognitive neurobiology, epistemology, and perception. He is a major proponent of eliminative materialism, which claims that everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings, and desires are part of a "folk psychology" of theoretical constructs without coherent definition, destined to simply be obviated by a thoroughly scientific understanding of human nature. Just as modern science has discarded such notions as luck or witchcraft, Churchland argues that a future, fully-matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs" or "feelings" (see propositional attitudes), and that even consciousness and personal identity are suspect. Such concepts will not merely be reduced to more finely-grained explanation and retained as useful proximate levels of description, but will be strictly eliminated as wholly lacking in correspondence to precise objective phenomena, such as activation patterns across neural networks. He points out that the history of science has seen many posits once considered real entities, such as phlogiston, caloric, the luminiferous ether, and vital forces, thus eliminated. In The Engine of Reason Churchland hypothesizes that consciousness might be explained in terms of a recurrent neural network with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He says his proposal is probably mistaken in the neurological details, but on the right track in its use of recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This is notably a reductionist rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.

Churchland is author of Matter and Consciousness; The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul, A Philosophical Journey into the Brain; A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science; Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (with others); and Neurophilosophy at Work.