The Routledge Handbook of PanpsychismWilliam Seager Panpsychism is the view that consciousness – the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe – is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the world, though in a form very remote from human consciousness. At a very basic level, the world is awake. Panpsychism seems implausible to most, and yet it has experienced a remarkable renaissance of interest over the last quarter century. The reason is the stubbornly intractable problem of consciousness. Despite immense progress in understanding the brain and its relation to states of consciousness, we still really have no idea how consciousness emerges from physical processes which are presumed to be entirely non-conscious. The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism provides a high-level comprehensive examination and assessment of the subject – its history and contemporary development. It offers 28 chapters, appearing in print here for the first time, from the world’s leading researchers on panpsychism. The chapters are divided into four sections that integrate panpsychism’s relevance with important issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and even ethics:
The volume will be useful to students and scholars as both an introduction and as cutting-edge philosophical engagement with the subject. For anyone interested in a philosophical approach to panpsychism, the Handbook will supply fascinating and enlightening reading. The topics covered are highly diverse, representing a spectrum of views on the nature of mind and world from various standpoints which take panpsychism seriously. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 37
... Leibniz's Many Minds 44 Graeme Hunter 6 Panpsychism in the 19th Century 53 David Skrbina 7 William James, Pure Experience, and Panpsychism 66 Andrew Bailey 10 8 Overcoming the Cartesian Legacy: Whitehead's Revisionary Metaphysics ...
... Leibniz makes the anti-structuralist point that the causal organization of the mill, or the brain, cannot provide an explanation of the appearance of consciousness even if it is correlated with it.4 Leibniz was targeting the so-called ...
... Leibniz's celebrated solution to the mind-body problem, the pre-established harmony (1695/1997) between the material and mental realms, predicts the existence of neural correlates of consciousness. Leibniz (1696/1997) provides an ...
... Leibniz's 'New System' and Associated Contemporary Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7–36. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1696/1997). 'Letter to Basnage'. In R. Woolhouse and R. Francks (eds.), Leibniz's 'New System': And ...
... Leibniz is explicitly a panpsychist in his Monadology, but Leibniz's similarity to Aristotle is not often noticed. Newton insisted that an active principle had to be operative in nature, and not ex machina as in Descartes. But Leibniz ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |