(Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
Why Feminism Entails (Real) Panpsychism
Thursday, October 20th, 2016
Feminist
philosophers have long argued that mind-body dualism facilitates oppression
because it entails a hierarchical valuation of the mental over the bodily that
respectively maps onto differential valuations of men and women, among other
pairings. Recently, Galen Strawson and David Chalmers have championed the
metaphysical position of panpsychism in virtue of its capacity to overcome the
mind-body problem without positing emergence or generating conceivability
problems in regard to the nature of mind. If Strawson and Chalmers are correct
that panpsychism is the most viable alternative to Cartesian dualism—and I
believe that they are—then the following question arises out of the
intersection of feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind: Must feminism be
grounded in a panpsychic metaphysics? This chapter develops an argument for the
affirmative position. However, not just any kind of panpsychism is consistent
with feminism. Unlike the versions of panpsychism advocated by Strawson and
Chalmers, feminist panpsychism must be a “real panpsychism” that attributes
minds all the way down to rocks, plants, inanimate objects, and so on. Not only
is real panpsychism the only panpsychism capable of neutralizing the
hierarchies that justify oppression, but it is also the only approach that can
genuinely avoid emergence, thus making it one of the most desirable options in
the philosophy of mind.
7:30pm
Dominican University College
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