Search results for "Panpsychism"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Anthony Collins on the Status of Consciousness
2014
Anthony Collins (1676-1729) maintains that consciousness might be a material process or result from material processes. On the one hand, Collins accepts Locke’s view that from consciousness, i.e., the activity of thinking, we acquire no knowledge about the nature of the thinking substance. On the other, he takes seriously Samuel Clarke’s challenge that the thinking substance must be suitably unified because consciousness is unified. In this paper, I argue that, throughout his correspondence with Clarke, Collins maintains that consciousness signifies actual thinking and does not refer to the capacity of thinking. His main materialist thesis is that the powers of parts of material systems can…
Panpsychism, The Combination Problem, and Plural Collective Properties
2018
ABSTRACTPanpsychism claims that each fundamental entity is conscious, but then faces the problem of how such entities combine to make up our ordinary consciousness. In this paper, I show how panpsy...
Normativity all the way down: from normative realism to pannormism
2017
In this paper, I will give an argument for what I call pannormism, the view according to which if x instantiates a metaphysically basic normative property F, then whatever grounds the being of x also instantiates F. In slogan form: if there is normativity, there is normativity all the way down. Such pannormism is in many ways analogous to panpsychism, and my discussion also contains an important lesson for panpsychism, a way to avoid its so-called combination problem. In Sect. 1, I present the argument; in Sect. 2, I discuss its conclusion.
Il vincolo di affinità profonda. Verso una filosofia ambientale panpsichista
2022
The article provides some arguments in favour of a panpsychist turn in environmental philosophy. It first explains why dualism remains a favoured polemical target for many environmental activists and theorists, even though the scientific/metaphysical paradigm of reference is now generally physicalist. It then points to some of the tribulations of environmental philosophy in juggling dualism and physicalism. It goes on to describes some of the strategies adopted by environmental philosophers to establish an axiologically-relevant ontological affinity between humans and non-humans, and notes how these strategies punctually (and more or less explicitly and plausibly) return to the recognition …