Our project ran three essay competitions. The first two are for essays written for an academic audience, and the third was for the best essay written for a general audience that appears in a non-academic publication. The recipient of each prize received an award of £1000. The articles by the recipients of the awards for the first two competitions will appear open access in issues of Journal of Consciousness Studies and Religious Studies, respectively.
2023: Theme: "Is Consciousness Fundamental?" Winner of the prize: Dr. Yanssel Garcia, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Nebraska-Omaha for his paper, "Against the Irreducibility of Subjects." You can read his paper here.
2024: Theme: "Pansychism and the Divine Mind" Winner of the prize: Anand Jayaprakash Vaidya and Siddarth S for their essay 'Rāmānuja’s Cosmopsychist – Panentheistic Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.' Anand sadly died October 11 2024 of cancer, at the age of 48. He did very important work connecting panpsychism in contemporary analytic philosophy to panpsychism in Indian philosophy. You can read here a beautiful and fascinating piece Anand's wife Manjula Menon wrote about him.
2025: Theme: "Panpsychism in the Public Sphere" Theme: "Panpsychism in the Publich Sphere". First prize was awarded to Sam Kimpton-Nye (King's College London) for his essay "Can panpsychism make the world intelligible?" We are currently securing a venue for Sam's piece, after which it will be available. A close runner up was Jordi Galiano-Landeira (Centro Internacional de Neurociencia y Ética) for his essay "Everything, Everywhere all at once: Spinoza's Panpsychism of Information." This will be published in the Institute of Arts and Ideas.