Professor Peter Cheyne

Peter Cheyne is professor of philosophy and literature, Shimane University, Japan, and visiting fellow in philosophy at Durham University as well as at Clare Hall (2024–5).

Prof Cheyne publishes interdisciplinary philosophy, joining that discipline to intellectual history, religion, and literature. He has organized interdisciplinary conferences on themes in history of philosophy, literature, and the philosophy of science at Kyoto Notre Dame University, University of Tokyo, Kansai University, and Cambridge University. He is currently (summer–autumn 2024) finishing an interdisciplinary anthology on the history of philosophically idealist theories of life and matter, 1650–1850 while also polishing up articles on how inventive literary imagery worked within the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

His new project, about to begin at Clare Hall, is to research new and neglected ways of conceiving human experiences and intimations of transcendence as a sense of being and meaning beyond the known and the conventional. The project embraces both secular (art, scientific discovery, everyday life) and mystical accounts (religious, cosmic, or otherwise) of transcendence.