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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... involves extracting and purifying texts from (apparently) speaking subjects, and using those texts to generate a theorist's fiction, the subject's heterophenomenological world. This fictional world is populated with all the images ...
... involves subjectivity. And we can always retain the hope that a conservatively emergent path from neuroscience (or elsewhere in the sciences) will illuminate the generation of consciousness by a world bereft of funda- mental ...
... involves feeling of feeling, found in animals and human beings, where central nervous systems enable 'higher' organisms as wholes to feel just as the constituent parts show at least prefigurements of feeling at a local level. And ...
... involves otherworldliness or escape from this world. But belief in panpsychism and the related idea of a World Soul does not involve a flight beyond the natural world of becoming if the World Soul just is that world when considered as ...
... involves intrinsic properties instantiated at spatio-temporal points, is not suited to an Abhidharma analysis. My own reconstruction will use the notion of dharma-clusters, vertical causation and supervenience. There is intense debate ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |