Speaker Bio
Dr. Daan F. Oostveen is a philosopher and a scholar of religion working at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University. He graduated from Ghent University with M.A. degrees in both Philosophy and Comparative Literature. His PhD was awarded by the Faculty of Religion and Theology of VU Amsterdam, with a doctoral dissertation on multiple religious belonging. For his doctoral research, he spent a year as a research fellow at the People’s University of China in Beijing to study contemporary Chinese religious diversity in 2018. He is a founding member of the New European Humanities in the 21st Century Network (neh21.net), which works on connecting innovative research on the humanities in Europe for the World Humanities Report and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Future Humanities. His research interests include the new humanities, comparative religion, and posthumanism. He has published on new materialism and psychedelics, and has presented his research at Beyond Psychedelics and the International Conference on Psychedelics Research.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
On psychedelic humanities: interdisciplinary challenges to an emerging field
When we refer to the “psychedelic renaissance”, we predominantly refer to the rise of successful clinical trials, and medical research attention, as well as corporate interest. These developments are increasingly studied as a cultural phenomenon. Therefore, in research fields such as philosophy, medical humanities, history, anthropology, literature, religious studies, and anthropology, there has also been a renewed interest in studying the and understanding “psychedelics” phenomenon. This interdisciplinary field, in which questions often are transversal, has been identified as the “psychedelic humanities” (Langlitz 2023) but can also be situated in the context of the rise of the “new humanities” (Braidotti et al. 2024) or the “future humanities” (Tava and Oostveen 2022). This presentation will focus on three questions: a) how should the psychedelic humanities approach its research subject b) what questions should this field should ask, and c) how the psychedelic humanities can constructively collaborate with the clinical, psycho-therapeutical, and psychopharmacological research. To answer these questions, I will first give an overview of the history of humanities research on psychedelics, as well as an overview of the various subdisciplines. Secondly, I will look at the humanities approaches which arose with the current “psychedelic renaissance”, such as the contemporary philosophy of psychedelics, cultural analysis, and the approach of the “psychedelics humanities hub”. Finally, I will situate the psychedelic humanities in the context of the “new humanities”. I will conclude that the psychedelic humanities are crucial for a deeper understanding of what the medical application of psychedelics enables.