Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a Swedish-English Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics who specializes in fields pertaining to panpsychism, pantheism, mental causation, and altered states of consciousness through thinkers such as Whitehead, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Peter is a lecturer at The University of Exeter where he is a lead on the postgraduate courses in Psychedelics: Mind, Medicine, and Culture. He is co-director of Europe’s largest psychedelics conference, Breaking Convention, and the author of Noumenautics (2015), Modes of Sentience (2021), co-editor and contributor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics (2022) and Strange Attractor’s Breaking Convention: Musings and Meditations on Psychedelia (2025) – alongside numerous articles. As well as the TEDx Talker on ‘psychedelics and consciousness’, and speaker on the BBC’s show ‘The Trip’, Peter is an inspiration to the recreation of inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.
The psychedelic revival in the cultural flow of European metaphysics
In his seminal 1935 Vienna Lecture, phenomenologist Edmund Husserl warned us of the emerging ‘European crisis’ concerning the intellectual, societal, and psychological danger threatened by the alienation caused by a science ‘blinded by naturalism’ that could not rationally explain mind, or the value-laden lifeworld in which it and we live. Husserl’s proposed solution was his own science of Phenomenology that made mind primary, but its success was academic rather than cultural – the twentieth century saw a turn away from (especially German) metaphysics after the wars. So today we still live within this meaning-crisis, whereby our naïve cultural metaphysics cannot explain our consciousness or valuation of life or even the value of science itself – leading to nihilistic emptiness, and with it emasculated mental health and social-intellectual decline. The revival of psychedelics, with their potential to occasion alternate metaphysical experiences, in Europe in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is indicative of a burning need to free the European from such constricting metaphysics with its withered roots in the seventeenth century. Consequently, a way forward is for psychedelic therapy and research to become conscious of its metaphysical assumptions, its place in history, its context, and openly integrate metaphysical understandings into its practice so to become more effective, and ultimately to act as a bridge to advance mankind.