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.
Recent decades have seen a renewal of interest in panpsychism as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. This has, in part, also driven an increase in interest in classical Indian philosophical traditions among analytic philosophers of mind. Many of these cross-cultural studies pertaining to panpsychism (and cosmopsychism) have focused on one particularly influential school of Indian philosophy, Advaita (non-dual) Veda nta, the most famous proponent of which is sankara. In this work, we would like to consider the view of another influential philosopher and the school that developed based on his view - Rama nuja (eleventh century CE) and Viśiá1-Avaita (qualified non-dualism) Vedta. We argue that a cosmopsychist-panentheistic metaphysics that is motivated by Rauja's views offers a solution to the hard problem that is preferable to other comparable views and could form the basis for a panentheistic conception of God that is compatible with the reality of the freedom of human selves.