An AGHI-sponsored symposium has been a staple since we hosted the Society for the History of the Humanities for its fifth international meeting in our founding year. Since then, we have organized successful and well-attended symposia on prison education and the carceral state, on translation, featuring theoretical lectures, readings, and discussion panels with practitioners, and more.

On May 9th-10th, 2025, Stanford University’s 6th annual Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference will be held in person at Johns Hopkins University and hosted by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

This year’s conference topic, “Altered Sight, Altered Minds,” brings together doctoral students and scholars who 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.

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. Arielle Saiber (Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University) will lead the conference.

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.

Full Schedule here: https://philit.stanford.edu/altered-sight-altered-minds