Altered Sight, Altered Minds
May 9th - 10th, 2025
Johns Hopkins University
The Philosophy & Literature Workshop at Stanford and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins welcome submissions for the 6th annual Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference to be held in person on May 9th-10th, 2025 at Johns Hopkins University.
Conference Topic
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.
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.
Keynote Speakers
Antony Aumann (Professor of Philosophy at Northern Michigan University) and David Yaden (Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) will each deliver a keynote address during the conference.
Workshop Leader
Arielle Saiber (Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University) will lead the conference.
Conference Program
Friday, May 9th, 2025
All times are listed in Eastern Daylight Time
| 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. Business Meeting
Co-Chairs: Yi-Ping Ong (Johns Hopkins University), Joshua Landy (Stanford University), Lanier Anderson (Stanford University)
| 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Breakfast
| 11:00 a.m. Institutional Remarks (Prof. Yi-Ping Ong, Johns Hopkins University)
| 11:30 – 1:00 p.m. Panel: Mystical Vision and the Poem
Chair: Emilee Brecht (Johns Hopkins University)
Daeun Kim (Indiana University Bloomington) “Friends, Vision or No Vision: William Blake’s Visionary Heads and Friendship”
Jack Rodgers (Harvard University) ““Madness and the Mind of Winter: Modern Vatic Poetry in Stevens and Crane”
Tanavi Shirish Jagdale (Johns Hopkins University) “Amrutānubhav: Dnyāneshwar’s Altered View of the Non-Dual”
| 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Lunch
| 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Panel: Limits of Cognition
Chair: Toby Tricks (Stanford University)
Emily Shein (University of Chicago) “Kant on Poetic Cognition”
Adam Katwan (University of Chicago) “Dream, Negation, and Revelation in Philo, Freud, and Benjamin"
Andrew Fleshman (University of California, Los Angeles) “Who Looks Out From Its Eyes? - Varieties of Consciousness in Peter Watts' Blindsight”
| 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. Workshop
Prof. Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University) “Which Way to Inner Space?”
| 5:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Break
| 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Keynote lecture
Prof. David Yaden (Johns Hopkins University) “What are Psychedelic Experiences Like?”
Saturday, May 10th, 2025
All times are listed in Eastern Daylight Time
| 9:00 – 9:30 a.m. Breakfast
| 9:30 – 11:15 a.m. Panel: Perception and Selfhood Altered
Chair: Coco Ruan (Stanford University)
Emily Park (University of Virginia) “‘Looking Like’: Perception, Sight, and Simile in Mishima’s Spring Snow”
Ellie Wong (Stanford University) “Dissolving Margins: Altered Perception and Relational Selfhood in My Brilliant Friend"
Chelsea Christine Hill (University of Chicago) “The Flying (Wo)man in Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things”
Seungmin Baek, (Indiana University Bloomington) “Coleridge’s Double Touch and the Feeling of Existence”
| 11:15 – 11:30 a.m. Coffee break
| 11:30 – 1:00 p.m. Panel: Interventions on Consciousness
Chair: Alfredo Walls (Johns Hopkins University)
Michael Henderson (Washington University in St. Louis) “Spaced Out on Utopia: The Politics of Intoxication in Modernist Portrayals of Futurity”
Matthew Raymond (McGill University) “Tearing Open the Firmament: Chaos, Creation and Altered States in Deleuze and Guattari”
Andrew Stone (University of Chicago) “Immersion by Restriction in Virtual Reality”
| 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. Lunch
| 2:00 – 3:45 p.m. Panel: Experiences of Madness
Chair: Gianluca Giuseffi (Johns Hopkins University)
Jeremy Garbe (Carleton University) ““The Flowers of Madness”: Altered Mental States and the Imaginary in Sartre’s Philosophy and Literature”
Irina Znamirowski (University of Toronto) “Woyzeck's Stupid Dreams: Consciousness, Qualia, and Editorial Histories in George Büchner's Woyzeck”
Kristen De Man (University of Chicago) “Unconcealing the Ordinary: Madness, Sense, and Fantasy in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations”
Nishan Varatharajan (University of Chicago) “Knowing Left From Right in Plato's Phaedrus”
| 3:45 – 4:00 p.m. Coffee break
| 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Keynote lecture
Prof. Antony Aumann (Northern Michigan University)
| 5:30 pm – 6:00 p.m. Closing remarks
| 6:00 p.m. Reception
Download Poster of the Conference Program (PDF)
Proposal submission
All submissions must be sent via email in a single Word document entitled “Last Name Stanford-JHU” to PhilLitGradConference [at] gmail.com (PhilLitGradConference[at]gmail[dot]com) no later than January 5th, 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."
Sponsors
This conference is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University (Center for Philosophy, Art and Literature), Stanford University's Phil+Lit (The Initiative in Philosophy and Literature), and Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.