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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... consciousness, by taking seriously panpsychism. It contains a large variety and number of quality contributions, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective, which makes it a book of reference indispensable for anyone ...
... consciousness researcher at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon, 2019). His research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our overall theory of reality ...
... consciousness. The fundamental form of consciousness posited by panpsychism is presumably very remote from that of human consciousness and possessed of a primitive and unutterably simple nature. At a very basic level, the world is awake ...
... consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous in nature. This does not mean that everything is conscious. Whether a particular non-fundamental entity is conscious will depend upon the arrangement of its fundamental constituents given some ...
... consciousness can be understood as a natural phenomenon (see 2000: ch. 4). The staunch anti-panpsychist John Searle sometimes also suggests the need for a revolution in science in order to understand how consciousness is a 'biological ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |