Panpsychism in 1970: Keith Campbell on the Continuity Argument for Panpsychism
Keith Campbell stated that “continuity shows that men and one-celled organisms have the same basic nature”.
The Australian philosopher Keith Campbell (who was born in 1938) is one of the founders of what came to be called Australian materialism. He was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.
This essay is primarily based on Campbell’s chapter ‘Dualisms’, from his 1970 (second edition, 1985) book, Body and Mind.
This chapter has been chosen because it’s a (relatively) early reference to panpsychism by an analytic philosopher. That is, it occurred some time before the recent interest in — or fashion for — panpsychism.
This new interest in panpsychism can be said to have begun around in 1996, with David Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind. That said, “analytic panpsychism” partly gained inspiration from Thomas Nagel’s 1979 chapter ‘Panpsychism’ (in his book Mortal Questions). This interest in panpsychism didn’t fully kick in until around 2006, with Galen Strawson’s paper ‘Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism’.
