Speaker: Professor Patricia Churchland (President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego)
Date: Thursday 07 January 2021
Time: 18-20 h (Central European Time, i.e. Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin).
Location: online lecture. Zoom link: https://radbouduniversity.zoom.us/j/87187847652?pwd=blFOMWE4YlByZWZFTUdBUmI2NDlzQT09
Social Conscience: Evolutionary Origins and Brain Mechanisms
One tradition in moral philosophy depicts human moral behavior as unrelated to social behavior in nonhuman animals. Morality, on this view, emerges from a uniquely human capacity to reason. By contrast, recent developments in the neuroscience of social bonding suggest instead an approach to morality that meshes with ethology and evolutionary biology. According to the hypothesis on offer, the basic platform for morality is attachment and bonding, and the caring behavior motivated by such attachment. Oxytocin, a neurohormone, is at the hub of attachment behavior in social mammals and birds. Although all social mammals learn local conventions, humans are particularly adept social learners and imitators. Learning local social practices depends on the reward system because in social animals approval brings pleasure and disapproval brings pain. Problem-solving in the social domain gives rise to ecologically relevant practices for resolving conflicts and restricting within-group competition. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that explicit rules are essential to moral behavior, norms are often implicit and picked up by imitation.”
Patricia Smith Churchland is a philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She coined the term “neurophilosophy” in her 1986 book with the same title, and she is probably the most influential neurophilosopher and philosopher of neuroscience.
She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Churchland's work has focused on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. According to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. She applies findings from neuroscience to address traditional philosophical questions about knowledge, free will, consciousness and ethics.
Professor Churchland has held some of the most prestigious awards and also was awarded several honorary doctorates. To name just a few:
MacArthur Fellowship, 1991.
Humanist Laureate, International Academy of Humanism, 1993.
Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of Virginia, 1996.
Honorary Doctor of Law, University of Alberta, 2007.
Distinguished Cognitive Scientist, UC, Merced Cognitive and Information Sciences program, 2011.
Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, 2011.
For more information about The Dutch Distinguished Lecture Series in Philosophy and Neuroscience and the program of talks for this semester, please click here.
Organiser(s): Daniel Kostic, Henk de Regt, Leon de Bruin, Marc Slors, Peter Hagoort
and Gerrit Glas.