A New Debate on Consciousness: Bringing Classical and Modern Vedānta into Dialogue with Contemporary Analytic Panpsychism

Abstract

Recent analytic philosophers of mind, such as Galen Strawson (2006), David Chalmers (2015), Philip Goff (2006, 2017a, 2017b), and Itay Shani (2015, 2018), building off of the work of earlier pioneers, such as Thomas Nagel (1979), have articulated and defended some version of panpsychism. Strawson defends micropsychism, Chalmers defends panprotopsychism, and Goff and Shani advocate different versions of cosmopsychism. Although many of these philosophers draw from historical sources in the Western tradition, such as Baruch Spinoza, William James, or Bertrand Russell, none of them seriously explores the possibility of some kind of panpsychism in nonWestern philosophy, and, more importantly, the consequences of what a constructive engagement between Western and non-Western theories of panpsychism might provide.1 In contrast to analytic philosophers of mind, a growing number of scholars working in cross-cultural philosophy have begun to investigate both Western and non-Western approaches to panpsychism. For example, Douglas Duckworth (2017) has investigated panpsychism in relation to Yogācāra Buddhism, while both Luca Gasparri (2017) and Miri Albahari (2019) have investigated Advaita Vedānta in relation to cosmopsychism. This chapter aims to continue the work of cross-cultural philosophy by doing the following. First, it provides a background for current analytical discussions of panpsychism, which begins with the work of Galen Strawson, and moves through the work of Sam Coleman and Philip Goff in relation to micropsychism, cosmopsychism, the combination problem, and the decombination problem. Second, using a central claim from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, as well as recent work in analytic metaphysics 14