The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism

Front Cover
William E Seager
Routledge, Dec 9, 2019 - Philosophy - 396 pages

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:

  1. Historical Reflections
  2. Forms of Panpsychism
  3. Comparative Alternatives
  4. How Does Panpsychism Work?

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

Contents

Notes on Contributors
Plato and Panpsychism
Abhidharma Panprotopsychist Metaphysics of Consciousness
Spinozas Panpsychism
ManyMinded Leibnizs Many Minds
Panpsychism in the 19th Century
William James Pure Experience and Panpsychism
Whiteheads Revisionary Metaphysics
A New Approach to the MindBody Problem
Subjective Physicalism and Panpsychism
Breaking the Gridlock Between Emergence and Inherence
Some Comparative Remarks
Panpsychism and Russellian Monism
Can We Sum Subjects? Evaluating Panpsychisms Hard Problem
Panpsychism Versus Pantheism Polytheism and Cosmopsychism
A Quantum Cure for Panphobia

Russells Neutral Monism and Panpsychism
A Historical and Philosophical Overview
How the World Might be Grounded
Living Cosmos Panpsychism
Cosmopsychism Micropsychism and the Grounding Relation
The Subjective Dimension of Consciousness and Its Role
Panpsychisms Combination Problem Is a Problem for Everyone
What Does Physical Mean? A Prolegomenon to Physicalist Panpsychism
Strawson on Panpsychism
Idealism and the MindBody Problem
Index
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2019)

William Seager is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He works primarily in the philosophy of mind and consciousness studies; his most recent book is Theories of Consciousness (2nd edition; Routledge, 2016).

Bibliographic information