International Interdisciplinary Conference of Psychedelic Studies

The “International Interdisciplinary Conference of Psychedelic Studies”, organized by drd. Raluca Bilașco-Rusu and drd. Ștefăniță Manea, Doctoral School of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest (Department of Theoretical Philosophy), brings together students, professionals and researchers in philosophy of mind, phenomenology, neuroscience, psychiatry and cognitive science to engage in rigorous scholarly dialogue on certain psychedelic substances and their significance for mind, medicine, and culture.

The conference offers a genuinely interdisciplinary space — one in which phenomenological analysis, neurophilosophical modelling, empirical clinical findings, and questions of ethics and policy are held in productive tension. Presentations will span philosophy of mind, phenomenology, psychiatry, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the ethics of psychedelic research.

The event will take place on June 6th - 7th, 2026. Regular presentations will be 20 minutes in length, followed by 10-minute Q&A sessions. Keynote lectures will be 45 minutes followed by a 15-minute discussion period. The conference will adopt a hybrid format: presenters may choose to participate in person or via live stream, and all sessions will be available to remote attendees.

We encourage BA, MA and PhD students, as well as early PhDs, postdocs and researchers, to contribute with research abstracts related to the event's topic areas. Abstracts should be written in English and should not exceed 300 words. Abstracts will receive full consideration if submitted before May 20th, 2026 at [email protected] Word or PDF attachments preferred, with the message titled "abstract submission".

All submissions will undergo a process of blind peer review. (Please write your identifying details in the body of the email, and leave the attached abstract anonymized.) We intend notifications of acceptance to be sent out on or before June 1st, 2026. The conference programme will be announced as soon as review is completed. For any questions, please don't hesitate to email [email protected].

Thematic Areas

The conference welcomes contributions across the following domains:

• Philosophy of Mind · Phenomenology · Neurophilosophy
• Altered States of Consciousness · Ego Dissolution
• Transformative Experience (L.A. Paul) · Predictive Processing · Enactive/4E Cognition
• Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy · Philosophy of Psychiatry
• Mystical-Type Experiences · Metaphysical Belief Revision
• Ethics of Psychedelic Research · Informed Consent · Epistemic Justice
• Panpsychism, Idealism, and Cosmopsychist Interpretations of Psychedelic Experience

Panel Topics & Guiding Questions

• What is the ontological and epistemic status of psychedelic-induced experiences? Can they constitute genuine forms of knowledge?
• What can psychedelic-induced experiences teach or inform us about consciousness?
• How do predictive processing and the REBUS model account for the phenomenology of ego dissolution and oceanic boundlessness?
• In what ways do psychedelic experiences qualify as transformative experiences in L.A. Paul's sense — and what are the implications for rational decision-making?
• What does the entropic brain hypothesis tell us about the relationship between psychedelic states and ordinary waking consciousness?
• How should psychiatry respond to emerging evidence on psychedelic-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant conditions?
• What role do cultural, ceremonial, and ritualistic settings play in shaping the phenomenological content of psychedelic experiences?
• Can non-physicalist interpretations of psychedelic states — panpsychism, idealism, cosmopsychism — be defended on philosophical grounds?
• What ethical frameworks should govern research on psychedelic substances, including questions of vulnerability and epistemic justice?
• How do enactive and 4E approaches to cognition illuminate the embodied dimensions of psychedelic phenomenology?

Keynote Speakers

Karl Friston · University College London One of the most cited neuroscientists in the world, Karl Friston is the originator of the free energy principle and active inference framework — among the most influential theoretical contributions to contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind. His work offers a unified account of perception, action, and consciousness grounded in Bayesian brain theory, and has become central to current debates on the mechanisms underlying psychedelic states, including the REBUS model developed with Robin Carhart-Harris.  

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes · University of Exeter Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics who specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson—and in fields pertaining to panpsychism, pantheism, mental causation, and altered states of consciousness. He is a lecturer at The University of Exeter where he is a lead on the new MSc in Psychedelics: Mind, Medicine, and Culture. Peter is co-director of Europe’s largest psychedelics conference, Breaking Convention, and is on the board of breathwork charity Dreamshadow. He is a member of the drugs advisory committee group, DrugScience, he is on the advisory board of the Tyringham Institute, and is on the team of the established UK independent publisher, Psychedelic Press. Peter is the author of Noumenautics (2015), Modes of Sentience (2021), co-editor and contributor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics (2022), the TEDx Talker on ‘psychedelics and consciousness’.  

David Luke · University of Greenwich Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Greenwich and co-founder of the Breaking Convention conference, David Luke is one of the foremost researchers on the psychology and phenomenology of anomalous experiences induced by psychedelic substances. His work spans transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, and the anthropology of altered states, with particular attention to DMT, entity encounters, and the broader question of what radically non-ordinary experiences reveal about the nature of mind and reality. He is the editor of DMT Entity Encounters and Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience, and brings to the conference a rare combination of rigorous empirical inquiry and genuine openness to the most challenging implications of psychedelic phenomenology.