Essay Competitions

There will be three essay competitions. The first two are for essays written for an academic audience, and the third will be for the best essay written for a general audience that appears in a non-academic publication. The recipient of each prize will receive 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." More information about his article is here. His paper will appear open-access in an issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies.

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" Deadline 31st March 2025.