Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199359943
- eISBN:
- 9780199359967
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199359943.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Recent debates in philosophy of mind seemingly have resulted in an impasse. Reductive physicalism could not account for the phenomenal mind, and nonreductive physicalism could not safeguard a causal ...
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Recent debates in philosophy of mind seemingly have resulted in an impasse. Reductive physicalism could not account for the phenomenal mind, and nonreductive physicalism could not safeguard a causal role for the mental as mental. Dualism was considered the only alternative, but it exacerbates the problem of mental causation and seems to be a position that is hard to square with a naturalist evolutionary framework. In 1979, Thomas Nagel argued that if reductionism and dualism fail, and a nonreductionist form of strong emergence cannot be made intelligible, then panpsychism may be viable. It was not until David Chalmers’s “The Conscious Mind” in 1996 that debates on panpsychism entered the philosophical mainstream. Since then the topic has been growing rapidly, and some leading philosophers of mind as well as some scientist have argued for panpsychism. Galen Strawson claimed that panpsychism is not an alternative to physicalism but is the only realistic variant. Panpsychism is the thesis that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe. This book collects many of the most recent voices arguing for panpsychism as an alternative in analytic philosophy of mind in the twenty-first century. The key challenge for panpsychism is the so-called combination problem. How can many smaller minds combine into one unified larger mind? Several attempts to resolve this problem are documented in the book. Finally, some critics of panpsychism both from the physicalist and nonphysicalist camps have contributed papers to this collection.Less
Recent debates in philosophy of mind seemingly have resulted in an impasse. Reductive physicalism could not account for the phenomenal mind, and nonreductive physicalism could not safeguard a causal role for the mental as mental. Dualism was considered the only alternative, but it exacerbates the problem of mental causation and seems to be a position that is hard to square with a naturalist evolutionary framework. In 1979, Thomas Nagel argued that if reductionism and dualism fail, and a nonreductionist form of strong emergence cannot be made intelligible, then panpsychism may be viable. It was not until David Chalmers’s “The Conscious Mind” in 1996 that debates on panpsychism entered the philosophical mainstream. Since then the topic has been growing rapidly, and some leading philosophers of mind as well as some scientist have argued for panpsychism. Galen Strawson claimed that panpsychism is not an alternative to physicalism but is the only realistic variant. Panpsychism is the thesis that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe. This book collects many of the most recent voices arguing for panpsychism as an alternative in analytic philosophy of mind in the twenty-first century. The key challenge for panpsychism is the so-called combination problem. How can many smaller minds combine into one unified larger mind? Several attempts to resolve this problem are documented in the book. Finally, some critics of panpsychism both from the physicalist and nonphysicalist camps have contributed papers to this collection.
