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SKRBINA, David. Panpsychism in the West. A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass/London, England, 2005. viii + 314 pp. Cloth, $35.00This book is both a survey of the history of panpsychist ideas in the Western philosophical tradition, and an argument for taking panpsychism seriously as an alternative to familiar versions of materialism and dualism in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The historical sections aim to show just how widespread panpsychism has been, and thus to combat the perception that it is something marginal or hopelessly eccentric; they also provide a sympathetic overview of the arguments that have been used in support of panpsychism.
The opening chapter explores the concept of panpsychism. Skrbina claims that panpsychism is not itself a theory of mind, but a "meta-theory", which holds that, "however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things." (p. 2) This means that there is a very wide spectrum of possible panpsychist positions and, obviously, the blander that one's definition of mind is (for example, a simple functionalist one), the easier (and the less interesting) it will be to be a panpsyclust. Later in the chapter, though, he offers a definition which seems to have more content: "All objects, or systems of objects, possess a singular...