14 papers in the library · 182 citations · publishing 2009-2026
Religious Studies February 1, 2026 Andrei A. Buckareff, Philip Goff
Abstract The editors of the special issue on panpsychism and pan(en)theism introduce the issue. This includes brief summaries of each of the articles.
September 28, 2023 Philip Goff 1 citation
Abstract The most discussed examples of conscious states involve the qualities of sensory experience: colours, sounds, smells, and tastes. But human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding. As you look at this page, for example, you don’t experience meaningless squiggles but meaningful words. We can call this aspect of consciousness ‘experiential understanding.’ This...
Religious Studies July 3, 2023 Philip Goff 4 citations
Abstract In this article, I offer a response to Joanna Leidenhag's book Mind Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation . Whereas Leidenhag argues that the panpsychist's demands for explanation of the mind lead naturally to demands for an explanation of the whole universe, I counter that (i) the panpsychist's explanatory demands are not necessarily quite as general as...
Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics July 18, 2022 Philip Goff
AbstractThis chapter argues that wave function monism – a popular theory of the ontology of quantum mechanics – cannot be true, on the grounds that its truth is inconsistent with the reality of consciousness. According to wave function monism, fundamental physical reality consists of a complex-valued field in a high-dimensional space. Building on a specific analysis of the grounding...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness July 9, 2020 Philip Goff, Sam Coleman 4 citations
Russellian monism is a quite general approach to the problem of consciousness, which comes in a variety of forms depending on what is said about the categorical properties of basic physical entities. We can usefully distinguish between panpsychist and panprotopsychist forms. Panpsychist Russellian monists hold that the categorical properties of basic physical entities are experiential...
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society July 1, 2020 Philip Goff
Abstract: There has been a resurgence of interest in panpsychism in contemporary philosophy of mind. According to its supporters, panpsychism offers an attractive solution to the mind–body problem, avoiding the deep difficulties associated with the more conventional options of dualism and materialism. There has been little focus, however, on whether panpsychism can help with philosophical...
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy October 29, 2019 Philip Goff
Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the natural world. In a standard form of the view, the fundamental constituents of the physical world – perhaps electrons and quarks – have incredibly basic forms of conscious experience, and the consciousness of a human or animal brain is derived from the consciousness of its most basic parts. The main...
Topoi October 19, 2018 Philip Goff 9 citations
Revelation is roughly the thesis that we have introspective access to the essential nature of our conscious states. This thesis is appealed to in arguments against physicalism. Little attention has been given to the problem that Revelation is a source of pressure in the direction of epiphenomenalism, as introspection does not seem to reveal our conscious states as being essentially causal. I...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This is the first of two chapters discussing the most notorious problem facing Russellian monism: the combination problem. This is actually a family of difficulties, each reflecting the challenge of how to make sense of everyday human and animal experience intelligibly arising from more fundamental conscious or protoconscious features of reality. Key challenges facing panpsychist and...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This chapter outlines a consciousness-based approach to metaphysics: analytic phenomenology. Chapter 5 argued that introspection reveals the essential nature of our conscious states. Analytic phenomenology builds on this, taking our introspective grasp of the nature of consciousness as a crucial source of data for metaphysical enquiry. This methodology is explored in relation to contemporary...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This chapter explores and defends a form of cosmopsychism: the combination of panpsychism and priority monism (the latter being the view that there is only one fundamental individual). The crucial advantage of cosmopsychism is that it offers a solution to the Subject Irreducibility Problem, discussed in the last chapter. After developing the view in response to various challenges, an empirical...
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks 2014 Philip Goff 1 citation
I’m an analytic metaphysician who thinks analytic metaphysicians don’t think enough about consciousness. By ‘consciousness’ I mean the property of being a thing such that there’s something that it’s like to be that thing. There’s something that it’s like for a rabbit to be cold or to be kicked or to have a knife stuck in it. There’s nothing that it’s like (or so we ordinarily suppose) for a...
Consciousness and Cognition June 1, 2012 Philip Goff
A zombie is a physical duplicates of a human being which lacks consciousness. A ghost is a phenomenal duplicate of a human being whose nature is exhausted by consciousness. Discussion of zombie arguments, that is anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of zombies, is familiar in the philosophy of mind literature, whilst ghostly arguments, that is, anti-physicalist...
Dialectica 2009 Philip Goff 163 citations
This paper starts from the assumption that panpsychism is counterintuitive and metaphysically demanding. A number of philosophers, whilst not denying these negative aspects of the view, think that panpsychism has in its favour that it offers a good explanation of consciousness. In opposition to this, the paper argues that panpsychism cannot help us to explain consciousness, at least not the...