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139. - Panpsychism

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

Karolina Hübner
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Justin Steinberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is pervasive: each thing exhibits psychological features. On some versions of panpsychism, each thing has perceptions; on other versions, each thing has experiences or is conscious. In seeing mentality as extending much more broadly than we might ordinarily think, the panpsychist needs to provide a powerful argument for this position, and throughout the history of philosophy up to the present day, certain philosophers – no doubt, a minority – have tried to do precisely that. Among Spinoza’s rough contemporaries, Cavendish, Conway, and Leibniz among others belong to this minority. Spinoza is often regarded – though, as we will see, not without controversy – as falling into this category too, and the arguments for panpsychism that have been attributed to him are continuous with some of the most important arguments that philosophers nowadays employ to support panpsychist views.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Recommended Reading

Bennett, J. (1984). A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Hackett.Google Scholar
Curley, E. M. (1969). Spinoza’s Metaphysics. Harvard University Press. Chapter 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jonas, H. (1965). Spinoza and the theory of the organism. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 3, 4357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Renz, U. (2018). The Explainability of Experience: Realism and Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Theory of the Human Mind. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, M. (2016). Objects, ideas, and ‘minds.’ In Wilson, , Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (pp. 126–40). Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

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