Philosophy Brown Bag Seminar Series: Panenpsychism: breaking through problems besetting Panpsychism and Cosmopsychism in the Philosophy of Mind

Tuesday, April 14 11:45 AM - 12:35 PM

Lo Schiavo Science — 104 - Getty Study

Professor Purushottama Bilimoria will be presenting. Panenpsychism is best understood not as a variant of classical panpsychism but as a synthetic framework that situates consciousness within distributed informational fields spanning multiple ontological scales. Whereas constitutive panpsychism attempts to build macro-consciousness out of micro-experiential parts, and cosmopsychism begins from a primordial cosmic subject, panenpsychism proposes that conscious processes are structurally distributed and perspectivally instantiated across nested levels of organization. Drawing on the Extended Mind Hypothesis, Process Phenomenology and the perspectival insights of Advaita Vedānta in Indian Philosophy, this approach treats localized minds as emergent focalizations within a broader field of consciousness rather than as isolated substances or merely aggregated micro-subjects or macro(universal)-Subject (such as God).

Contact Information: Program Assistant for the Philosophy department, Brandon Marsh, 415-422-6543 or at bmarsh@usfca.edu