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
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... awareness of the self as a subject, or awareness of one's own mental states, or the ability to conceptualize one's own mental states as such. Consciousness is simply sentience, or the way things are present (to the mind). It is ...
... awareness. All the panpsychist needs to posit is that some form of subjectivity, some kind of primitive feeling, is at the foundation of the physical world. No positive conception of the physical precludes this posit, since we have no ...
... awareness (noesis). The point of the present chapter is not to claim that Plato has to be viewed as a panpsychist, but rather that one does not have to view him as a dualist, as is commonly assumed. A key passage to consider in the ...
... awareness among the ancient Greeks of nerves (neura), which were significant parts of the ancient scientific view of the world (see Solmsen 1961). P3 is divine psyche. If I am not mistaken, the following four-term analogy takes us to ...
... awareness (awareness of thoughts, feelings, etc.). Conscious experience, according to the Ābhidharmikas, is always directed at objects, i.e., it is of something. In this the Abhidharma philosophers agree with phenomenologists that ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |