The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative

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...

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1. VerfasserIn: Segall, Matthew T. (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
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Veröffentlicht: Mohr Siebeck [2020]
In: Philosophy, theology and the sciences
Jahr: 2020, Band: 7, Heft: 1, Seiten: 105-131
IxTheo Notationen:NBD Schöpfungslehre
TK Neueste Zeit
VA Philosophie
weitere Schlagwörter:B Experience
B Process-relational philosophy
B Consciousness
B Emergence
B Panpsychism
B Physicalism
B Panexperientialism
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Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung: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.
ISSN:2197-2834
Enthält:Enthalten in: Philosophy, theology and the sciences
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1628/ptsc-2020-0008