19th Seminar 2027: Attention & Consciousness: New Directions
[Français]
The Centre de Recherches Phénoménologiques (Creph) at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Liège is pleased to announce the next Creph Research Seminar in Phenomenology, devoted to attention and consciousness, which will take place from Monday 10 May to Friday 14 May 2027.
The Creph Seminar is a week-long event held every two years, each edition exploring a specific topic in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, broadly understood. The program will include invited talks and contributed papers selected through an call for abstracts.
Over the past two decades, the relationship between attention and phenomenal consciousness has attracted renewed philosophical interest, giving rise to an increasingly rich and differentiated literature. Yet, despite increasingly refined arguments and mappings of the logical space, foundational questions remain debated. Is attention necessary, or even both necessary and sufficient, for phenomenal consciousness? What kind of necessity is at stake? If experience overflows attention, what is the nature of this unattended phenomenology? Is it fully determinate and specific, or does attention contribute to making it so?
Alongside these questions about the dependence relations between attention and consciousness, a further line of inquiry concerns attention's contribution to the character and organization of experience. This includes its effects on our overall experience and the precise nature of the structural role often attributed to it. It also concerns whether attention contributes uniformly across different kinds of experience or plays distinctive roles in different experiential domains such as, for example, emotional and cognitive phenomenology.
These issues also have epistemic consequences, particularly concerning attention's contribution to the acquisition of perceptual and introspective knowledge. Debate centers on whether attention facilitates such knowledge, whether it is indispensable to it, and whether its effects can sometimes be disruptive — for instance, when attending to an experience modifies the very phenomenon we seek to understand. Clarifying these possibilities requires examining how attention's contribution to conscious experience bears on its capacity to be knowledge-conducive.
The seminar aims to explore these questions by bringing contemporary debates into dialogue with historical accounts of attention. We welcome contributions from phenomenology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, as well as historical investigations addressing these themes.
Invited speakers
- Natalie Depraz (Université de Paris Nanterre)
- Anna Giustina (Universitat de València)
- Hanne Jacobs (Tilburg University)
- Hamid Taieb (Humboldt Universität Berlin)
- Juliette Vazard (Universität Zürich)
Call for abstracts
We welcome submissions addressing the themes of the seminar from contemporary or historical perspectives. A non-exhaustive list of possible questions includes:
- Is attention necessary or even necessary and sufficient for phenomenal consciousness? Can consciousness occur without attention? Is there unconscious attention?
- Does attention act as a gatekeeper for conscious experience, or does phenomenal consciousness overflow the limits of attention? Is the phenomenology overflowing attention fully determinate and specific or is it indeterminate or generic?
- How does attention modify the phenomenal character of experience? What implications does this have for theories of consciousness (e.g., representationalist views)?
- What structural role, if any, does attention play in the organization of the phenomenal field?
- Does attention play sui generis phenomenal and/or epistemic roles in particular experiential types (e.g., emotional phenomenology, cognitive phenomenology, agential phenomenology, etc.)?
- What is the epistemic import of attention with respect to perceptual and introspective knowledge acquisition? Is attention necessary to have propositional and/or doxastic justification? What role does attention play in inquiry?
- Can the so-called phenomenal modification problem be overcome?
- What is the relationship between attention and inner awareness?
- How have historical accounts of attention addressed these issues, and what can they contribute to contemporary debates?
Those interested in presenting at the seminar are invited to submit an abstract of no more than one page, excluding references, in either English or French, to both and (please make sure that both addresses are included in the email).
Each speaker will have a one-hour slot, so presentations should ideally last around 30-40 minutes, followed by Q&A. The presentation itself may also be given in either English or French.
Submission deadline: 4 January, 2027.
Notification of acceptance: 15 January 15 2027.
Contact: •
http://www.pheno.ulg.ac.be/go?u=1
