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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... individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any ...
... individual subjects of experience could be 'summed' or 'combined' into more complex subjects, whether quantum mechanics can help fund a panpsychic outlook, whether causation itself can underpin some form of panpsychism and the core ...
... individual identities (albeit ones of very little interest) but which can interact by local causation. The familiarity we have with things like this, think marbles or, indeed, LEGO bricks, is what funds confidence in our conception of ...
... individual as a whole can feel what happens to its parts, even if the individual partially transcends the parts. If the reader thinks that all of this is foreign to Plato, it should be noted that in the Republic (462c–d) Plato makes it ...
... individual life (P2). That is, bodily life is permeated by besouled, dynamic power, hence it is a mistake to think of soul in Plato as having a sort of epiphenomenal existence hovering above body. As was mentioned earlier, there is ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |