A pioneer in the field of neurophilosophy – a discipline that reflects on philosophical problems in the light of scientific knowledge about the functioning of the human brain. Churchland thus starts from the premise that our mental processes have a basis in neurobiological mechanisms. In her most recent book, Conscience: the Origins of Moral Intuition, she concludes that conscience is also a product of the evolutionary development of the brain, and that some moral intuition is thus possessed not only by humans but also by other mammals. In the context of thinking about freedom, her approach is inspiring not only in that it admits a certain degree of neurobiological (and thus genetic) conditioning of our values (and political beliefs), but also in that it offers a new perspective on the question of free will. According to Churchland, its existence cannot be dismissed simply because our decisions are conditioned by a chain of antecedent phenomena; it is, however, more useful to refer to it as self-control.