Call for papers
The Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience invites submissions of abstracts (300–500 words, not including references) for its group meeting at the Pacific APA (online, April 8–12, 2026). Accepted submissions will be given a 25-minute presentation time, with up to 15 minutes for Q&A. The topic of the panel should be approached within the frame of classical and contemporary phenomenology (e.g., Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Gurwitsch, Hopp, D.W. Smith, and others), postfoundational phenomenology (e.g., Mensch, Salis), and post-Brentanian scholarship. Please submit your abstracts by September 29 via https://sophere.org/2026-pacific-apa-abstract-submissions/. Send questions to ols@sophere.org, cc to olouch@ucdavis.edu.
The self-reflective inner aspect of awareness (meant as its reflexivity and not as higher-order thinking) have induced multiple perspectives in philosophy. (See, e.g., Farrell and McClelland; Kriegel). These views, however, have all been confined to ordinary consciousness viewed naturalistically, and not reduced to consciousness as such. As noted by D. W. Smith (2005, 95): “It is important to see, on phenomenological grounds, that there are different forms of awareness in one’s experience.” That noted, perspectives on naturalistic ordinary consciousness may or may not apply to consciousness as such. This leads us to compare inner awareness in ordinary consciousness with the consciousness of interruption, often characterized by inwardness: religious experience, meditation, or altered states (including chemically induced ones). Inwardness is understood as intentional or spontaneous attention to the interiority of the self (cf. Flood 2013; Husserl 2001, 335-339). Comparison of ordinary consciousness with the consciousness of meditation, religious experience, or altered states may work in lieu of imaginal variations, which help explicate eidetic structures of concrete experiences and/or consciousness as such. Is inner awareness essential to consciousness? Should we attribute to it an epistemic role, or is it but a form of consciousness that serves self-non-self distinctions? How does inwardness affect luminosity and transparency of consciousness? What are the relationships between inner awareness and the body in religious or spiritual inwardness? We invite reflections on these and similar topics, as well as on eidetic analyses of concrete experiences and of relationships between description and meaning of inner awareness.