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
... for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-81713-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71770-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS CONTENTSCONTENTS Notes on Contributors viii Preface to the Handbook Copyright.
William Seager. CONTENTS. CONTENTSCONTENTS Notes on Contributors viii Preface to the Handbook xi 1 Introduction: A Panpsychist Manifesto 1 William Seager PART I Historical Reflections 13 2 Plato and Panpsychism 15 Daniel Dombrowski 3 ...
... main interest is in reconciling scientific accounts of matter and the brain with what we glean from the personal perspective. Daniel Dombrowski is in the Philosophy Department of Seattle University. viii Notes on Contributors.
... note that we can have theoretical reasons for ascribing a property without there being any direct observational evidence for the ascription. So, the kind of minimal consciousness in question is not 'self-consciousness' or ...
... Note that Leibniz makes the anti-structuralist point that the causal organization of the mill, or the brain, cannot provide an explanation of the appearance of consciousness even if it is correlated with it.4 Leibniz was targeting the ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |