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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... Soul and the Body'. In R. Woolhouse and R. Francks (eds.), Leibniz's 'New System' and Associated Contemporary Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7–36. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1696/1997). 'Letter to Basnage'. In R. Woolhouse ...
... soul or (b) matter; or (c) both soul and matter. The second option would have been anathema to Plato. Further, there is considerable well-known evidence in Plato's dialogues in favor of the third option, leading many scholars to think ...
... soul and Platonic forms as well as the importance of the World Soul in several of Plato's later dialogues. The forms and the World Soul make Plato's view somewhat unique in the history of panpsychism. An initial passage to consider can ...
... soul (i.e., the World Soul) as persuading other souls is to presuppose that each lesser soul has the power to be moved. Plato hints at the panpsychist position (in which only concrete singulars feel, and in which the abstract is real ...
... souls, souls can also be moved by the motionless forms. Yet if the forms are items in divine psyche, then soul in some sense is fundamental for metaphysical speculation and hence Plato came quite close to panpsychism. That is ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |