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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... sorted into a number of themes. The first is a set of historical reflections ranging from Ancient Greek philosophy, Buddhist thought, Early Modern philosophy to the rich period for panpsychism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The ...
... sort of consideration does not make panpsychism exactly plausible. It strikes many as beyond strange to think of the world as awake and kind of 'humming' with a primitive consciousness suffused throughout it as if there was an extra ...
... sort of dualist. But the issue is complicated and not merely because of the understandable difficulty involved in determining Plato's own views in his dialogues. That is, there is also evidence in favor of the claim that the first ...
... sort of ontological priority to body, a priority that is found in the Epinomis as well. (On the authenticity of the Epinomis as an epilogue to Plato's Laws, see Crombie 1962: 12,329.) For metaphysical or cosmological purposes, psyche is ...
... sort of curious existence apart from both matter and soul) panpsychism is threatened, but on the more defensible intradeical view (where forms are items in divine psychical process) panpsychism is preserved. It can be said that the ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |