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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... radical new way, a way in which we will have to ultimately give up both the notion of particles and fields (1999: 116). • David Bohm: the entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivis- ible unit in ...
... radical theoretical transformation is not a big problem. The predictive and explanatory successes of field theories remain since the structure they revealed remains after theory change. Let's group this widespread and internally quite ...
... radical emergence in which subjectivity simply appears at some, seemingly arbitrary, point in the physical development of the universe rather like Locke's fantasy of God directly 'superadding' consciousness to matter. Although logically ...
... radical holism, in which the single fundamental entity is the universe as a whole. Panpsychism then becomes what is called 'cosmopsychism', and the combination problem becomes the 'de-combination' problem. This somewhat Spinozistic view ...
... radical pro-stucturalist discussion in Ladyman et al. (2007). 10. There are non-physicalist alternatives to panpsychism. Idealism, for example, retains defenders and has sparked some renewed interest in recent philosophy (see e.g. ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |