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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... position and motion; (b) a single fundamental kind of change, viz, change of position . . . (c) a single elementary causal law, according to which particles influence each other by pairs . . . (d) a single and simple principle of ...
... position is very simple: 1. If consciousness is an illusion then it merely seems that it exists. 2. But if anything seems to exist, that seeming is a state of consciousness. 3. Therefore consciousness (states of consciousness) exists ...
... position (in which only concrete singulars feel, and in which the abstract is real only in the concrete, thus soul is the inclusive type of reality) when he indicates that soul is coincident with every action and passion. But no ancient ...
... positions are clearly defended in ancient philosophy by Plato and others which, when put together by later thinkers, can lead to a credible version of panpsychism: (1) Plato's discovery in the Sophist of the metaphysical concept that ...
... positions in important ways by drawing on Buddhist thought. My response to the Buddhist is that there is no one view that qualifies as the Buddhist view of consciousness. Therefore, what I shall be exploring here is a Buddhist view of ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |