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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... Perhaps the most astonishing example of our growing knowledge, which is now underpinning practical clinical interventions, is the work of Adrian Owen, who investigates people diagnosed as being in a profound vegetative state. Such ...
... Perhaps the laws' power is just a primitive metaphysical fact which links properties with the appropriate level of modal force. Perhaps the laws somehow follow from the causal powers of the fundamental entities of the world. Maybe the ...
... perhaps the fundamental reality of the physical world itself partakes of some aspect of subjective consciousness. Again, this does not mean that quantum field particle states are reflecting about their own existence, enjoying a rich ...
... Perhaps there is nothing more to the world than the relational structures posited by physics, along with all the conservatively emergent outgrowths of basic physical processes. There are two immediate problems with such a heroic ...
... perhaps why the World Soul strikes many or most contemporary readers as odd. It did not strike Plato as odd, however. In fact, according to Plutarch, all of the ancient philosophers, except for Aristotle and the atomists, believed that ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |