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 79
... 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 ...
... basic level, the world is awake. Mostly people intuitively find panpsychism implausible, but sometimes for bad reasons. For example, panpsychism does not imply that everything is conscious because not everything is a funda- mental ...
... basic building block of a panpsychic view of the universe as well as different ways that panpsychism might describe the world, notably in the distinction between micropsychism (which assigns primitive mental aspects to elementary ...
... basic idea that the nature of matter is not obvious just from our daily interactions with material objects forms the core of Noam Chomsky's intriguing but somewhat obscure views on the mind-body problem, seemingly leading to Chomsky ...
... basic subjectivity. Many or most would still prefer a physicalist metaphysics. But it seems to me that, at bottom, there are only two alternatives which abide with standard physicalism.10 The first is emergentism. Like the word ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |