Journal of Consciousness Studies

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Journal of Consciousness Studies appeared in 1994, and within a year, a reviewer writing in Nature made a bold prediction. "There is no other journal quite like it," the review declared, "and one day we shall look back to its appearance as a defining moment." That was a striking thing to say about a new academic publication from Imprint Academic. Edited from its founding by Joseph Goguen, the journal set out to treat consciousness as nobody's exclusive intellectual property. What would bring a philosopher and a cognitive scientist to the same pages? How do you build a peer-reviewed forum for a question that no single discipline owns? And what happens when the field's biggest thinkers decide to use it?

• 2. A Language Anyone Can Read

  ›

  Professor Valerie Gray Hardcastle of the University of Cincinnati took over as editor in 2006. She inherited a journal built on an unusual editorial conviction. Most peer-reviewed journals assume their readers share a common technical vocabulary. This one made a deliberate choice to use non-specialized language. A researcher in one field could read the work of someone in another without needing a technical translator. The same accessibility extended to general readers who were not working academics at all.

  Philosophy, critical theory, comparative religion, and the humanities were all included alongside the natural and social sciences. Most journals are bounded by disciplinary convention; this one used those conventions as a starting point and then deliberately moved past them. The founding purpose was to give researchers in separate fields a shared space. Their work would be visible and engaged across the lines that usually kept them apart.

  That design is reflected even in where the journal sits within academic infrastructure. It is indexed across multiple disciplines, from the social sciences to the humanities to psychology.

• 3. Papers and Positions

  ›

  Francis Crick and J. Clark published "The Astonishing Hypothesis" in 1994, the journal's founding year. Donald Michie contributed "Consciousness as an Engineering Issue" in the same year, approaching the subject from a completely different angle. Those two early pieces showed the range the journal was after from the start.

  David Chalmers published "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" in 1995. The title alone announced a direct confrontation with one of philosophy's most contested questions. He returned in 2018 with "The Meta Problem of Consciousness," showing how the same forum could track a thinker's ideas across more than two decades.

  Galen Strawson contributed "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" in 2006. Philip Goff contributed a collection titled "Is Consciousness Everywhere (Essays on Panpsychism)." Rupert Sheldrake pushed the same question further with "Is the Sun Conscious?" in 2021. Anil Seth offered a counterpoint that same year with "The Real Problem(s) with Panpsychism." Daniel Dennett came at the debate from a different angle in 2016 with "Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness."

  Francois Kammerer and Keith Frankish co-authored "What Forms Could Introspective Systems Take? A Research Programme" in 2023. Recent issues have also covered animal consciousness, indigenous philosophies of consciousness, and grief, with these thematic clusters sometimes appearing as double issues.

  Major gatherings in Tucson, Arizona, have also found their way into the journal's pages, as part of its record of how the field organizes itself.

• 4. The Wider Community

  ›

  The Toward a Science of Consciousness conference is a recurring presence in the journal's pages. It is organized by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The journal has specifically covered events including TSC 2012, one recorded example of how it tracks an ongoing and organized community of researchers.

  In April 2010, the journal published a special issue collecting papers from the first Online Consciousness Conference. That issue brought work from a novel kind of academic gathering into the journal's published record.

  The journal is indexed across nine separate databases. These include PsycINFO, the Philosopher's Index, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and the Social Scisearch. That spread reflects the breadth of disciplines the journal has drawn into its pages.

  Emotional consciousness is among the subjects the journal is still taking up in its most recent issues. The questions it has hosted since its founding remain, by any measure, unresolved.