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

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/NAGPSupport the show