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
... explain, not in the details that can be left to science, but just the general mechanism of emergence by which the biological generates consciousness which would then reveal to us where to look for the neurological details. There is ...
... Explaining Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.). Seager, William (2017). 'Could Consciousness Be an ... Explain Consciousness'. New York Review of Books, January 10: 54–58. Stapp, Henry (1993). 'A Quantum Theory of the ...
... explain the world, in general, and human nature, in particular? On a Platonic basis such an explanation would seem to be in terms of either: (a) soul or (b) matter; or (c) both soul and matter. The second option would have been anathema ...
... 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 might give way to ubiquitous self-motion. P2 is psyche per se ...
... explains why it is often assumed without argument that Plato was a dualist. The aforementioned four-term analogy actually runs both ways. Just as P3 helps to explain why there is a universe or a cosmos, in that the World Soul brings ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |