David Chalmers directs our attention toward an interesting conundrum: “Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know” (1996). David Lodge reminds us that “Literature is the record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have” (2002). In addition to literature serving as a medium of transmission for a character’s interior monologue or a stream of human thought (Woolf, 1919), literature has also been a space for writers to speculate on the form and function of myriad consciousnesses: hive minds, artificial intelligence, hybrid intelligence, alien(ated) minds, the consciousness of nature, androgenous minds, simulated consciousness, and divine and demiurgic minds, to name a few.


Our seminar invites papers that explore the intersection of philosophy and literature to stimulate discussion of minds and brains, consciousness and unconsciousness, and how records and representations thereof manifest in literature.