Ep. 28: "Panpsychism", Thomas Nagel (CM classic!)

03/16/22 • 9 min

The focus of this episode is Thomas Nagel’s “Panpsychism”, published by Cambridge University Press in his “Mortal Questions” anthology.

This isn’t a recent paper, it was first published in 1979. But it is a nice, sober, discussion of panpsychism that makes quite clear a relatively sensible motivation for the view as well as what is involved in its denial. This all makes for a nice change to some of the rather heated public debates of the issue nowadays. So, call this a Condensed Matter classic. Maybe I’ll do more of these in future because I definitely think there are plenty of older papers out there that are worth revisiting in this format.
Link to the paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/NAGP

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The focus of this episode is Thomas Nagel’s “Panpsychism”, published by Cambridge University Press in his “Mortal Questions” anthology.

Support the show

Previous Episode

Ep. 27: “Modal dispositionalism and necessary perfect masks”, Barbara Vetter and Ralf Busse

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The focus of this episode is “Modal dispositionalism and necessary perfect masks”, by Barbara Vetter and Ralf Busse, forthcoming in Analysis.
Link to the paper: https://academic.oup.com/analysis/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/analys/anab061/6511667?redirectedFrom=fulltext
You can carry on the discussion on Twitter and there's even an Instagram page. Thanks for listening!

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Next Episode

Ep. 29: "Modal Conventionalism", Ross Cameron

The focus of this episode is Ross Cameron's "Modal Conventionalism" published in The Routledge Handbook of Modality in 2021.
Here is a link to the paper, but these handbooks are insanely expensive, which I suppose is a good reason to do more episodes based on their chapters!

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