Freddy Purcell –
One of PhilSoc’s most entertaining speakers returned for a third year in a row to brighten up our exam season. To those of you that didn’t make it, I hope the exams are treating you well. This summary will follow the usual format. However, this talk was based on Peter’s extremely fresh paper “Pantheism: One and all” that you can find a review for here.
Psychedelics are having a revival that Exeter University is at the head of, with a new department, masters course, and (as some of you that stuck around on campus during the holidays were lucky enough to witness) the largest European psychedelics convention for the second year in a row. However, despite this increased popularity, much of the discussion around psychedelics focusses on their therapeutic benefits, meaning they have received little philosophical attention. Peter started to address this blind spot with his 2023 paper arguing for the necessity of a metaphysical framework in psychedelic therapy and research. His newest paper, “Pantheism: One and all” looks to continue this work by providing some conceptual clarity to the term Pantheism, an element of many psychedelic experiences.
Pantheism (from ‘pan’=all and ‘theos’=God) was first coined as a term in 1697 by the mathematician Jospeh Raphsom, where he argues against the idea in defence of Panhylism, the idea that all is matter. However, Peter argues that Pantheism has a much longer history than this, with elements of Pantheism present in Platonic thought, Stoicism and Sufism. He also argues a foundational text in the consideration of Pantheism is Plato’s Timaeus, where Plato describes the anima mundi (world soul) and demiurge (a sort of divine mover). Pantheism aligns more with the idea of the world soul, where the divine and the world are one, while the demiurge is much closer to the transcendent God of classical theism. Peter argued it is this conceptual foundation that meant when Spinoza espoused a philosophy that argued both mind and matter are expressions of one fundamental substance that is God or nature, he was shunned by Jews, Christians, and even the notorious atheist, David Hume. This is because the idea that nature is God seems to contradict the Christian idea of a transcendent God, meaning Spinoza was deemed an atheist. Peter then described how Spinozism was a taboo subject until the 1780s when the philosophers Lessing and Jacobi prompted public discourse on the validity of the doctrine, reviving Spinoza within Western thought.
After this historical discussion, Peter argued that Spinoza’s Pantheism is a form of Monist Pantheism that argues that God is one fundamental substance with an infinity of expressions, including the two forms we can perceive of mind and matter. This monistic form of Pantheism is considered to be its main configuration by Peter. The other form of Pantheism that Peter considers legitimate is Idealist Pantheism that considers mentality to be the fundamental substance of reality, as opposed to the infinite expressions of God/Nature that Monist Pantheism considers fundamental. Peter then dismissed several ideas that claim to be pantheistic. These include:
- Physicalist Pantheism: The idea that the universe is material, meaning that God is matter. Peter argues this is a contradiction as divinity is removed from God because God loses any mental properties. This then leads to a bit of a superfluous doctrine that is equivalent to saying something like ‘what exists, exists’.
- Partial Pantheism: The idea that God is some aspects of nature, but not all of them, and vice versa. Peter essentially argues that this is just improper Pantheism where God and Nature should be one.
- Panentheism: The idea that God is in all of nature, yet beyond it too. Peter argues this becomes oxymoronic because it proposes that God is existence, but more than existence too. An interesting discussion of this idea and how it was supposed to be a bridge between classical theism is contained in Peter’s recent paper (2025, p.15).
With some conceptual clarity provided to Pantheism, we moved to the discussion phase of the evening, where some deep questioning revealed some interesting possible ramifications of Pantheism. One of these is contained in Pantheism’s belief that because mind and matter are different expressions of one thing, this solves the classic problem of how an immaterial mind can move a material body, because ultimately, they are one. This idea revives some of the original intent of Spinoza’s Pantheism in response to Descartes. It would be an alternative to the neuroessentialism prevalent in recent times that argues the brain is the only component to the mind, joining 4e cognition in beginning to move away from this idea. Another implication of Pantheism is the idea that maybe humans aren’t exceptional in nature as part of one whole system. Arne Naess picks up on this idea within the formation of deep ecology. Peter therefore argues that the metaphysical idea of Pantheism can have deep implications on how we understand ethics and issues in the philosophy of mind.
That concludes this Phil on Tap summary, I hope you have enjoyed. If you have any questions about the ideas presented in this talk, please comment below. And if, perchance, you want to read more about Pantheism, why not check out our summary of Peter’s most recent paper or the papers themselves.
Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2023) ‘On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research’, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol.14, pp.1-17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1128589
Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2025) ‘Pantheism: One and all’, Philosophical Psychology, pp.1-26. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2499627.