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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... constitute us as mesocosmic wholes (P2). This clue has also largely been ignored by scholars, which perhaps explains why it is often assumed without argument that Plato was a dualist. The aforementioned four-term analogy actually runs ...
... constitute the basic furniture of the world. Panpsychism as a prominent example of the liberal naturalist approach has the license to introduce a different kind of metaphysics to replace the current physicalist ontology and its settled ...
... constitute con- scious experiences. The Sautrāntika view of the nature of dharmas and the constitution of conscious experiences from the basic dharmas arises as a result of a series of critiques of the early Abhidharma Sarvāstivāda ...
... constitute conscious experiences (2012: 130). Dreyfus seems to favour the latter though with an important qualification. He notes that “the Abhidharma analysis of the mental is a description of the complexity of the components of mental ...
... constitute aroma, colour, warmth, etc., are simultaneously provided by various sense consciousnesses. But there are countless many other coffee-relevant dharmas available in the basic consciousness that have resulted from previous ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |