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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... physical phenomena and structure that we can observe.7 The structures and systems of relations amongst the physical attributes of the world are generated from the purely physical fundamental features posited by physics with no hint of ...
... physical in nature; quite the opposite in fact, given that all the physical features we know are either fundamental or conservative emergents that arise from assemblages and interactions of, ultimately, the fundamental features of the ...
... physical processes (skandhas) that arise and cease in a causal sequence.1 The distinctive contribution of the Ābhidharmikas is that they reduce the time scale of sequential mental and physical processes and regard them as discrete ...
... physical objects as aggregates of dharmas. Thus, we can think of mental dharmas as tropes that have temporal dimensions only.4 Such a trope-theoretic interpretation of dharmas has been used to reconstruct an Abhidharma account of the ...
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Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |