This article argues that current trends in the humanities that embrace panpsychism, vibrant matter, object-oriented ontologies, and extended or dispersed conceptions of consciousness, could benefit from an examination of Victorian debates about panpsychism. The article does this by exploring panpsychism’s relation to Victorian theories of evolution, late nineteenth-century idealism, and above...
In nineteenth-century Britain, the story of thinking about other people was inseparable from the story of the struggle between the different intellectual disciplines that took thinking about other people as their proper business. The tension between psychology and philosophy – overlapping, but increasingly discrete, disciplines – forms a crucial context for this chapter and the next. This...
In this chapter, I follow the thread of the previous chapter's investigation of nineteenth-century accounts of mental causation into the later decades of the century. The preceding chapter demonstrated that a focus on consciousness as a form of action could reveal strange philosophical bedfellows in the 1830s – a quirky but compelling idealist such as James Frederick Ferrier, and believers in...