Matéria e Consciência

In Matter and Consciousness, Paul Churchland clearly presents the
advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism,
reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the
striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial
intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical
issues.

Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental
results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research
bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their
implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some
cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most
significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the
reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism.

A Bradford
Book