The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology
This paper brings Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism into conversation with the recent panpsychist turn in analytic philosophy of mind. Whitehead's unabashedly metaphysical project broadly aligns with recent critiques of reductive physicalism and the turn toward a conception o...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Mohr Siebeck
[2020]
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| In: |
Philosophy, theology and the sciences
Year: 2020, Volume: 7, Issue: 1, Pages: 105-131 |
| RelBib Classification: | CF Christianity and Science VA Philosophy |
| Further subjects: | B
Experience
B Process-relational philosophy B Consciousness B Emergence B Panpsychism B Physicalism B Panexperientialism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Summary: | This paper brings Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism into conversation with the recent panpsychist turn in analytic philosophy of mind. Whitehead's unabashedly metaphysical project broadly aligns with recent critiques of reductive physicalism and the turn toward a conception of experience as basic to Nature. This paper thus examines physicalism's dominant strategies for explaining consciousness, including eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, and emergentism, and concludes that the panpsychist alternative is superior. However, Whitehead's process-relational panexperientialism diverges in crucial respects from the dominant substance-property variants of panpsychism. I argue that Whitehead's version avoids many of the conceptual difficulties plaguing the latter and that it thus represents a more formidable alternative to standard physicalism. |
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| ISSN: | 2197-2834 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Philosophy, theology and the sciences
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1628/ptsc-2020-0008 |