This year's conference topic, "Altered Sight, Altered Minds" brings together doctoral students and scholars that work at the intersection of philosophy, literature, the arts, and media studies to interrogate theories of consciousness, perception, and what it means to "see" beyond the visual paradigm of experience.
When: May 9-10, 2025
Where: Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore)
Description:
William Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." First-person conscious experience presents a range of seemingly intractable problems, both epistemic and metaphysical. This year's conference invites participants to consider how the representation of atypical conscious experience in literature and the arts (mystical visions, dreams, madness, psychedelia, etc.) can shed light on a range of such philosophical issues. How can a work of literature or philosophy teach us to see, and what mode of perception are we talking about when we ask this?
Some contributions might address the following questions and lines of inquiry:
How can such encounters with new forms of experience change us?
What is it for experience to be embodied?
What is it for 'intuition' to give us knowledge of reality, be it moral or mystical?
How do different cultures condition the division between "normal" and "altered" consciousness?
What are the limitations of literature as a vehicle for grasping subjective experiences radically different to our own?
What has been the historical role of mind-altering substances (alcohol, drugs, etc.) in creative expression, and what interpretative implications does this have?
The representation of altered states of consciousness in literature including but not limited to psychedelic and religious experience, dreams, hallucination, and madness from the first-person perspective.
Proposal submission
All submissions must be sent via email in a single Word document titled "Last Name Stanford-JHU" to PhilLitGradConference@gmail.com no later than Jan. 5, 2025, and include the following items: (1) an abstract (200 words max), (2) a short bio, (3) your full name, email address, and affiliation. Please use "Philosophy & Literature Conference Stanford-JHU" in the subject line.
