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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... Cause Quantum Collapse?'. Philosophy Now URL=https:// philosophynow.org/issues/121/Does_Consciousness_Cause_Quantum_Collapse. Mill, John Stuart (1843/1963). A System of Logic, vol. 7–8 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto ...
... cause of body. A key question is: how close do such passages take us to the claim that Plato was a panpsychist? His view seems to have been, at first glance at the Phaedrus (245e, also 246b, 275b) and Laws (896a, also 895c, 896d, 898d ...
... caused materialists or dualists to suppose that the microscopic parts of these things also lack self-motion (see Hartshorne 1983: ch. 2–3). In Plato's dialogues we learn that soul is the universal cause (aitias tou holou – Epinomis 988d) ...
... causes from the past does not supply the sufficient cause to explain the behavior of the smallest units of becoming in the world. Plato was wiser than he knew. Little did he realize that in 20th–21st-century science universal mechanism ...
... dialogues that is supportive of the claim that he can be viewed as a panpsychist. This evidence includes the ideas that: only soul is capable of self-motion; soul is the universal cause of body; soul is 21 Plato and Panpsychism.
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |