Handbook on Pansychism

Seager, William. The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness – the most puzzling and 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.

Historical Reflections

Forms of Panpsychism

Comparative Alternatives

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.

Contents

1 Introduction: A Panpsychist Manifesto 1
William Seager

PART I
Historical Reflections 13
2 Plato and Panpsychism 15
Daniel Dombrowski
3 Abhidharma Panprotopsychist Metaphysics of Consciousness 25
Monima Chadha
4 Spinoza’s Panpsychism 36
Martin Lin
5 Many-Minded Leibniz’s Many Minds 44
Graeme Hunter
6 Panpsychism in the 19th Century 53
David Skrbina
7 William James, Pure Experience, and Panpsychism 66
Andrew Bailey
8 Overcoming the Cartesian Legacy: Whitehead’s Revisionary Metaphysics 78
Pierfrancesco Basile
9 Russell’s Neutral Monism and Panpsychism 87
Donovan Wishon
10 Panpsychism Reconsidered: A Historical and Philosophical Overview 103
David Skrbina

PART II
Forms of Panpsychism 117
11 Beyond Cosmopsychism and the Great I Am: How the World
Might be Grounded in Universal ‘Advaitic’ Consciousness 119
Miri Albahari
12 Living Cosmos Panpsychism 131
Freya Mathews
13 Cosmopsychism, Micropsychism and the Grounding Relation 144
Philip Goff
14 The Crux of Subjectivity: The Subjective Dimension
of Consciousness and Its Role in Panpsychism 157
Michael Blamauer
15 Anomalous Dualism: A New Approach to the Mind-Body Problem 168
David Bourget

PART III
Comparative Alternatives 181
16 Subjective Physicalism and Panpsychism 183
Robert J. Howell
17 Panpsychism: A Cognitive Pluralist Perspective 192
Steven Horst
18 Neutral Monism Reborn: Breaking the Gridlock Between Emergence
and Inherence 204
Michael Silberstein
19 Panpsychism and Non-standard Materialism: Some Comparative Remarks 218
Daniel Stoljar
20 Panpsychism and Russellian Monism 230
Torin Alter and Sam Coleman

PART IV
How Does Panpsychism Work? 243
21 Can We Sum Subjects? Evaluating Panpsychism’s Hard Problem 245
Luke Roelofs
22 Panpsychism Versus Pantheism, Polytheism, and Cosmopsychism 259
Yujin Nagasawa
23 The Argument for Panpsychism From Experience of Causation 269
Hedda Hassel Mørch
24 A Quantum Cure for Panphobia 285
Paavo Pylkkänen
25 Panpsychism’s Combination Problem Is a Problem for Everyone 303
Angela Mendelovici
26 What Does “Physical” Mean? A Prolegomenon to Physicalist
Panpsychism 317
Galen Strawson
27 Strawson on Panpsychism 340
Terry Horgan
28 Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem 353
David Chalmers

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