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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... sense of independent units with persistent and genuine individuality. It is simply the requirement that some form of concrete reality is needed to, so to speak, realize what are otherwise pure abstractions.9 Why not, asks the ...
... sense (contrast 'the sun seems to be rising' versus 'it seems that Trump will irreparably harm America'). The latter sense does not immediately demand any experiential component, which is why Dennett can say without falling into ...
... sense is fundamental for metaphysical speculation and hence Plato came quite close to panpsychism. That is, panpsychism is compromised if too much emphasis is placed on forms or abstract objects as having causal power of their own or as ...
... sense mine and in another sense not mine. Further, there was some sort of dim awareness among the ancient Greeks of nerves (neura), which were significant parts of the ancient scientific view of the world (see Solmsen 1961). P3 is ...
... sense that such powers are not to be found solely in human beings). Third, there is an argument from first principles wherein soul/mind is not derivative or incidental, but central and primary. And fourth, there is the well-known ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |