The Centre de Recherches Phénoménologiques (CREPH) at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Liège (Belgium) is pleased to announce the next CREPH Research Seminar in Phenomenology, devoted to attention and consciousness, which will take place from Monday 10 May to Friday 14 May 2027.

The CREPH Seminar is a week-long event held every two years, each edition exploring a specific topic in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, broadly understood. The program will include invited talks and contributed papers selected through a call for abstracts.

Over the past two decades, the relationship between attention and phenomenal consciousness has attracted renewed philosophical interest, giving rise to an increasingly rich and differentiated literature. Yet, despite increasingly refined arguments and mappings of the logical space, foundational questions remain debated. Is attention necessary, or even both necessary and sufficient, for phenomenal consciousness? What kind of necessity is at stake? If experience overflows attention, what is the nature of this unattended phenomenology? Is it fully determinate and specific, or does attention contribute to making it so?

Alongside these questions about the dependence relations between attention and consciousness, a further line of inquiry concerns attention’s contribution to the character and organization of experience. This includes its effects on our overall experience and the precise nature of the structural role often attributed to it. It also concerns whether attention contributes uniformly across different kinds of experience or plays distinctive roles in different experiential domains such as, for example, emotional and cognitive phenomenology.

These issues also have epistemic consequences, particularly concerning attention’s contribution to the acquisition of perceptual and introspective knowledge. Debate centres on whether attention facilitates such knowledge, whether it is indispensable to it, and whether its effects can sometimes be disruptive - for instance, when attending to an experience essentially modifies the very phenomenon we seek to understand. Clarifying these possibilities requires examining how attention’s contribution to conscious experience bears on its capacity to be knowledge-conducive.

The seminar aims to explore these questions by bringing contemporary debates into dialogue with historical accounts of attention. We welcome contributions from phenomenology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, as well as historical investigations addressing these themes.

Invited Speakers

Natalie Depraz (Paris Nanterre)
Anna Giustina (Valencia)
Hanne Jacobs (Tilburg)
Hamid Taieb (Humboldt)
Juliette Vazard (Zurich)

Organizers: Arnaud Dewalque, Valentina Martinis, Jacopo Pallagrosi.

Scientific Committee: Christian Blanco, Alexis Delamare, Arnaud Dewalque, Ethan Field, Quentin Hosch, Bruno Leclercq, Francesca Maffettone, Valentina Martinis, Jacopo Pallagrosi, Denis Seron.

Contact:[email protected];[email protected]

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