The last issue of the New Yorker has a long profile of Paul and Patricia Churchland. This is a must-read for anyone who is not well acquainted with the history of the Churchlands.
Unfortunately, the article gets some important aspects of the background history wrong. For instance, it suggests that when the Churchlands went to college (1960s), behaviorism was dominant (what about cognitivism?) and philosophers did not discuss the mind-body problem and, with the exception of Thomas Nagel, continued to ignore the mind-body problem until David Chalmers revived it in the 1990s! It does not come as a surprise that Chalmers was one of the authors’ source, but I would hope that Chalmers did not describe the history the way they did.
The article argues that although the Churchlands convinced (some) philosophers of mind to pay attention to neuroscience, they, ot at least Pat, have since “left the field” of philosophy. In other words, Pat talks mostly to neuroscientists while ignoring other philosophers (except her husband, of course).
The Churchlands in the New Yorker
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Of course I would never describe the history in this way. It would be completely inaccurate to do so. Philosophers have never stopped paying attention to consciousness, though the extent of the attention waxes and wanes. One thing I may have said is that there was an explosion of work on consciousness in both science and philosophy starting in the early 1990s, spurred especially by people such as Crick and Koch, Dennett, and Penrose.
Thanks. I didn’t think so. It’s fair to add, though, that although the authors David mentions preceded him, he (especially with his book The Conscious Mind) probably did more than anyone else to attract attention to the debates about consciousness and the mind-body problem.
It’s hard to say. I was studying with Robert McCauley in the mid-90s and Chalmers’s name rarely came up (as important as his work is now recognized to be). Instead we were reading the Churchlands, Dennett, Stich and McGuinn, as well as the standards by Nagel, Searle, and Jackson — and I was reading Penrose on my own. It probably just depended on where you were at the time.
I would generally credit Dennett and Penrose with the resurgence in interest, though, since they achieved some degree of popular recognition with their books Consciousness Explained and The Emperor’s New Mind.
In the 1960s, behaviourism was indeed dominant, though cognitivism was beginning to displace it. Think about how appointments were made in those days. Quine was still a hero in philosophy; and Chomsky and Fodor didn’t yet have the authority to influence the composition of departments.