Whitehead panpsychism

Whitehead panpsychism. While he is very modest about the success of his philosophical project Panpsychism is the view that consciousness – the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe – is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the world, though in a form very remote from human consciousness. Whitehead's Panpsychism as the Subjectivity of Prehension Leemon B. Mind is universal. In collaboration with Bertrand Russell, he co-authored the landmark three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). Jul 9, 2017 · Panpsychism would rather view the river as an aggregation of many smaller consciousnesses. Those unfamiliar with Whitehead might gain some familiarity by reading Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, a series of essays and responses originally delivered at a 1983 conference hosted by the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont Graduate School. Whitehead understood this mental pole as always present, but Philip Clayton understands mentality as emergent (Clayton 2020b). McHenry LEEMON B. 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 Panpsychism – Introduction – Peter Sjöstedt-H – (Rough Lecture Notes) Panpsychism is the view that forms of sentience are ubiquitous in nature, in contradistinction to the popular notion that sentience is an emergent property of the physiology of complex animals. For Gottfried Wilhelm For a clear introduction to, and defense of, Whitehead’s panpsychism see Griffen (1998); another interpretation, and pantheistic reworking, can be found in the writings of Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), for example, in Hartshorne 1972. His views are compared with those of deep ecologists, and several problems with his panpsychism are Nov 28, 2016 · Clark, David S. Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude. fold: Whitehead is addressing concerns whose legitimacy is widely acknowledged — how physics can explain these phenomena is a well-recognized problem — and the legitimacy of these concerns in no way presupposes panpsychism. In Whitehead’s formulation, all “actual entites” or “actual occasions” have both a “physical” pole, and a “mental” or “conceptual” pole. Terms related to current scientific thought: 1. (This variety of panpsychism is known as cosmopsychism. Though present in many historical and cultural periods, the term “process philosophy” is primarily associated with the work of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). 624–545 BCE) deployed an analogical argument for the attribution of mind that tends towards panpsychism. A. Process philosophy is a longstanding philosophical tradition that emphasizes becoming and changing over static being. Different versions of panpsychism constrain these models of God, and vice versa. by Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes. Whitehead. Concise examination of the intersection between panpsychism and theology. Whitehead’s whole philosophical method is designed to avoid the sort of reductionistic overstatements that lead to absolute idealisms and absolute materialisms alike. Brief History. Panpsychism is distinguished from hylozoism (all matter is living) and pantheism (everything is God). Montpelier, VT For a clear introduction to, and defense of, Whitehead’s panpsychism see Griffen (1998); another interpretation, and pantheistic reworking, can be found in the writings of Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), for example, in Hartshorne 1972. May 23, 2001 · In very general terms, Whitehead's panpsychism faces the same objections as any other version, and stems from the same basic anti-emergentist intuition (for a clear introduction to, and defense of, Whitehead's panpsychism see Griffin 1998; another interpretation, and pantheistic reworking, can be found in the writings of Charles Hartshorne May 23, 2001 · 1. See full list on iep. One thinks here of Alfred North Whitehead’s writings. keywords: panpsychism, Anthropocene, mind/body dualism, Freya Mathews, Alfred North Agar, who was a follower of Whitehead's, conceded that there can be "no coercive demonstration" of the truth or falsehood of panpsychism, but it "leads to a more consistent and satisfying world picture than any of the alternatives"; and, unlike these alternatives, panpsychism is not committed to the paradoxical view that "the mental factor Whitehead’s panpsychism, teleology, Platonism and theism. 15 Charles Hartshorne, for example, says that “panpsychism” or “psychicalism” are terms Whitehead’s philosophy. Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism. In this view, consciousness isn’t something that just happens in brains or living organisms. Whitehead . His metaphysics can be seen as a developed form of ‘panpsychism’ [everything has awareness]. Philosophy: +ve & -ve Jun 23, 2009 · In any case, Whitehead gives his own crucial twist to the overall panpsychist argument. The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought—of the effort to Donald Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Appendix and Ch. Although not an idealist in the traditional sense, Whitehead rejects mind-body dualism by doing away with matter rather than mind. Without the time-binding wave of consciousness established by actual entities remembering their past instant(s), experiencing, choosing, and acting in their present instants, and anticipating and then passing their inheritance on to their future instant(s), it would not be possible to begin a sentence and then go on to complete it in a way that has meaning. Thus, the resulting form of “panpsychism” is more naturalistic than commonly supposed, and it solves both the composition problem (traditionally fatal to panpsychism) and the “hard problem. e. Emphasis is on Whitehead, Hartshorne, and process philosophy generally, which limits the scope of this study. Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism. Creating Creative Nature: Whitehead's Panpsychism as a cosmology of contingent order and a cosmogony of valuation The major philosophers responsible for developing and defending modern panpsychism are represented, including Leibniz, Fechner, Clifford, and Whitehead; detractors such as Edwards and Popper are also featured. 0. a panpsychism: that all entities have sentience (or, ‘proto-sentience’), combined with a panentheism: that God is nature and more. Oct 1, 2014 · Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. Theory of Prehensions; Internal and External Relations; Reading: Donald Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Ch. He argues that: panpsychism is the claim that everything has someone sort of psychic life There may be some terminological ambiguity about whether panpsychism actually requires that every lifeless physical system has its own form of inner life (whether we are talking about complex composite systems like rocks or just elementary physical entities like electrons), or whether an idealist like Berkeley can be Dec 4, 2008 · The basis for the connection between panentheism and panpsychism is Whitehead’s concept that every actual occasion consists of a mental and physical pole. Together with progress, creativity, techno-science and industrialization, evolutionism and its by-product eugenism, and, last but not least, the emergent feminist movement, it gave a peculiar flavor to its main trait: the faith in the superiority (if not the superior rationality) of Western civilization and in its A Conspectus of A. Among its positive features are its deployment of a method of extensive abstraction to recover geometry from atomless space-time, and its plausible account of enduring substances. An introduction outlines the principal issues raised in the selections, while commentaries accompanying the selections place them in Feb 16, 2024 · Their panpsychism is really Materialism 2. utm. , events or instantiations, of experience. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception. In a landmark 2006 paper , Strawson took this idea and ran with it, making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually Sep 10, 2016 · Philosophers including Giordano Bruno, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred North Whitehead have embraced different forms of panpsychism, and indeed the presocratic Thales of Miletus claimed that “soul is interfused throughout the universe” (Aristotle, De Anima, 411a7). One of the first Presocratic philosophers of ancient Greece, Thales (c. keywords: panpsychism, Anthropocene, mind/body dualism, Freya Mathews, Alfred North 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 just like Whitehead in his 1925 Science and Modern World that the idea of evolution leads to panpsychism: The creative activity of matter can be explained only if mental being is present in the world at its very beginning. Dec 9, 2019 · It offers 28 chapters, appearing in print here for the first time, from the world’s leading researchers on panpsychism. 3. Introduction Whitehead's concept of prehension is undeniably the master principle of his process metaphysics. At the end of the twentieth century, there was a renaissance of panpsychism in analytic philosophy Using Whitehead’s process philosophy, this article will defend panpsychism and develop the philosophical criteria of causation, relationality, unity and intentionality to differentiate between natural living forms, natural nonliving forms, and human artifacts. edu In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead, to my taste the best 20 th Century metaphysical philosopher, provides a speculative philosophical system that can serve as a pretty good foundation for the further exploration and development of Panpsychism. Supremely brilliant is Whitehead’s speculative method, which links a system of categories with principles. 14 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18. Apr 24, 2013 · While there are worse positions for a metaphysician to espouse—idealism and dualism to name but two, and Whitehead thankfully skirts both—Whitehead’s panpsychism does not, at least in PR, appear to derive from anxieties about accounting for the mind among matter, or dissatisfaction with emergentism, such as he will have encountered in Oct 1, 2014 · Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. At a very basic level, the world is awake. ” 4 days ago · Whitehead’s panpsychism is often referred to as “process panpsychism”, as it describes the universe as a series of dynamic processes rather than static objects. 229 • 11 • whitehead’s panpsychism and deep ecology Leemon B. While he is very modest about the success of his philosophical project May 23, 2001 · The most significant development and defense of a panpsychist philosophy in the twentieth century was undoubtedly that of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Panpsychism seems implausible to most, and yet it has experienced a remarkable renaissance of interest over the last quarter Feb 16, 2021 · According to some versions of the theory, the universe itself is conscious. Panpsychism, (from Greek pan, “all”; psychē, “soul”), a philosophical theory asserting that a plurality of separate and distinct psychic beings or minds constitute reality. Whitehead, Field Being and Panpsychism, by Laura Weed Page 2 Whiteheads panpsychism is apparent in the intentional and valuational status of his subject-superjects. A system of panpsycho-panentheism. 13 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 167. 1. ” We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Panpsychism (from pan and psyche, the Greek for all and soul, respectively) is the doctrine that what exists is sentient or made up of sentient parts; sometimes, but perhaps less clearly, the doctrine is formulated as the claim that experience is a fundamental feature of all reality. Panexperientialism. But plenty of sane and reputable thinkers take panpsychism seriously, and the numbers of those who do are Probably the best way to locate panpsychism within the mind–body problem is to see it as the counter position to emergentist views of mentality (of which modern physicalist theories are all examples). N. Whitehead's most far-reaching and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. The term Panexperientialism was coined by Philosopher David Ray Griffin in the 1970s, to capture Whitehead’s metaphysical world view. Panpsychism in the History of Western Philosophy. It Indeed, Whitehead was clearly aware of and influenced by the early phases of the development of quantum theory. Presenter Biographies: Hypnosis ranks amongst the most fundamental ideas that made the Victorian age. The different motivations for linking panpsychism to (dis)belief in God reveals the range of ways of interpreting the spiritual import of positing mentality in nature. Instead, it is an inherent feature of all reality. Process Philosophy. Nov 19, 2022 · Whitehead's panpsychism is commonly referred to as pan-experientialism, because the world and everything in it is a society of fleeting experiences, rather than enduring substances or subjects. Jun 3, 2021 · Whitehead’s aesthetics of experience likewise offers a therapeutic resource of contemporary analytic problems. de Quincey, Christian. An aesthetic account of experience refuses to let nature bifurcate into “nature as factful” (on the one hand) and “nature as meaningful or value-laden” (on the other). Firstly, consciousness/the mind is a complex ‘grouping’ of experiences. Radical Nature. Oct 15, 2012 · Quite independently of Whitehead’s philosophy and commitments to panpsychism, a number of analytical philosophers have argued that the present-day debate in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action has been hampered by an ontology that is focused on upshots (states, and state-like events) and promote a theoretical ‘Gestalt’ switch in Key to this integration is Whitehead’s understanding that mind, at its most rudimentary, is simply the intrinsic temporality of a physical event. Dec 7, 2023 · So, even if, in retrospect, we want to say that linguistic phenomenalism is a form of panpsychism, at the time it wasn’t being presented or debated as such. Whitehead developed a distinctive process-ontological version of panpsychism, according to which the fundamental components of reality are “occasions”, i. [8] Whitehead's process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the Whitehead is in fact undoubtedly the foremost exponent of panpsychism in the twentieth century. ) This may sound like the wackiest idea ever — far crazier than space aliens living secretly among us. Clear indications of panpsychist doctrines are evident in early Greek thought. However, are there really deep similarities between Whitehead's ideas of process and the ideas of quantum theory? Does quantum mechanics necessarily lead to (some form of) panpsychism? The answers of these questions are not evident. May 21, 1996 · Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. Contents: Intro. For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Using Whitehead’s process philosophy, this article will defend panpsychism and develop the philosophical criteria of causation, relationality, unity and intentionality to differentiate between natural living forms, natural nonliving forms, and human artifacts. 2 Modern common sense bridles at the claim that planets, trees, rocks, atoms, or electrons possess mental attributes. On the contrary, panpsychism is a consequence of Whitehead’s independently motivatedsolution to the problem. His views are Nov 19, 2022 · However, the relationship between panpsychism and philosophy of religion is not infinitely flexible. This is the primordial nature [ of God. 1. Whitehead’s Metaphysics. McHenry abstract: This essay examines Whitehead’s philosophy of organism as a basis for an ecological ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. How Whitehead’s way of combining reductionism and holism answers the two strongest objections to panpsychism Whitehead’s theory of the nexus, with its very different synchronic and diachronic organization (whole depends on the parts/parts depend on the whole) enables Whitehead to head off the two strongest objections to panpsychism. McHENRY is Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024. According to Whitehead, the true units of reality are not the materialist notion of random bits of brute matter floating in space, but in what Whitehead calls “occasions of experience”. 61 We cannot enter the details of this issue here, but we can annul the problem as one specifically detrimental to 2. Also, it might be mentioned that panpsychist ideas were floated by some non-analytic philosophers during this time. Jul 5, 2024 · As Whitehead said, there are “no arbitrary breaks” in nature. Furthermore, Whitehead’s metaphysics is the sole example of a comprehensive philosophical system which aims to take into account the radical transformation of science which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century with the development of relativity and quantum mechanics, developments with which Whitehead was, as a first rate Nov 17, 2021 · The idea has many forms and versions, but modern studies of it house them all inside one grand general theory: panpsychism. 4 Whitehead, Hartshorne and Others A. Research Program May 25, 2015 · Whitehead’s version of panpsychism doesn’t rush to reduce matter to mind (or to reduce the multiplicity of materiality to the identity/unity of mentality). Sep 8, 2024 · The wave dimension is crucial. His views are Jan 15, 2018 · This is an old problem stated by Ralph Cudworth in 1678,59 and even Immanuel Kant in 1766. 60 There are numerous proposed solutions to this problem, foremost perhaps is its effacement through Whitehead’s metaphysical system. The only way to truly understand panpsychism is through its most advanced development in A. What is of interest to me here is that one of the core reasons Whitehead had for espousing panpsychism is one that has currently resurfaced within the writing of analytic philosophers of consciousness. N. Mar 19, 2023 · In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead, to my taste the best 20 th Century metaphysical philosopher, provides a speculative philosophical system that can serve as a pretty good foundation for the further exploration and development of Panpsychism. [8] Whitehead's process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the Panpsychism strictly speaking is the view that there is one fundamental substance Russell (1897-1970)8 and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)9, is based on the McHenry/Whitehead’s Panpsychism and Deep Ecology 249 12 Also see my “Whitehead’s Panpsychism as the Subjectivity of Prehension,” Process Studies 24 (1995), 1–2. . i. Whitehead describes the primordial nature of God as present through valuation and intention in the concrescent objects in the world. This essay examines Whitehead's philosophy of organism as a basis for an ecological ethics. He also expresses this by saying that they have both a “public” aspect and a “private” aspect. “If the panpsychists are right, it could cast doubt on the foundations of a worldview that has been deeply embedded in our psyche for hundreds of years: that humans are superior to everything around them. Further Reading: Leemon McHenry, Whitehead's Panpsychism as the Subjectivity of Prehension," Week 6: Metaphysics of Process: Relations. yby xpymq wdylht hljhe rgxxd bxj hjxpj ziplj vmwupda epfanyp