Abstract Chapter 10 reconstructs Vivekananda’s philosophical justification of panentheistic cosmopsychism and his account of how the single Divine Consciousness individuates into the varied conscious perspectives of humans and non-human animals. He provides two complementary arguments in favor of panentheistic cosmopsychism: (1) an “involution argument” for panpsychism, which is based on the...
Chapter 9 concerns what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers has called the “hard problem of consciousness”—the problem of explaining how conscious experience arises. The chapter provides an in-depth reconstruction of Vivekananda’s Sāṃkhya-Vedāntic solution to the hard problem of consciousness and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary philosophical debates. The chapter first outlines...