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
... body problem Andrew Bailey is Associate Professor in Philosophy, and Associate Dean (Research & Graduate Studies) for the College of Arts at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He works on the philosophy of consciousness ...
... body problem, seemingly leading to Chomsky requiring/expecting a physical-science revolution before consciousness ... bodies. Using real-time functional MRI, Owen is able to interact with supposedly vegetative subjects by asking them to ...
... body problem and addresses the more modern specific problem of consciousness. We can throw off the shackles of an outmoded and falsely restrictive conception of the physical and declare that the world is awake. Notes. This term goes back ...
... 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 and R ...
... Body Problem'. In I. Good (ed.), The Scientist Speculates. Lon- don: Heinemann, pp. 284–302. (Reprinted in J. Wheeler and W. Zurek (eds.), Quantum Theory and Measurement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 168–81.). Wilson ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
Part II Forms of Panpsychism | 117 |
Part III Comparative Alternatives | 181 |
Part IV How Does Panpsychism Work? | 243 |
Index | 374 |