Johns Hopkins/Stanford Phil + Lit Graduate Student Conference 2025
Altered Sight, Altered Minds
The 6th annual Philosophy & Literature Conference, "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?
Conference Website