I am a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where I work with Evan Thompson. I am also a philosophy instructor at Camosun College, which is located in Victoria, Canada.
My general research interest lies in defending the enduring relevance of the phenomenological tradition established by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophy of mind. Moreover, I am interested in phenomenology’s sustained critique of scientific naturalism. Above all, I am interested in classical Husserlian phenomenology’s attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous theoretical foundation for explaining the relation between consciousness and nature and for formulating the problem of consciousness.
More specifically, my focus of phenomenological research is centered on the interrelation between self-consciousness, time-consciousness and norm-consciousness, especially as evinced in skilled, effortless and spontaneous action. In my work, I bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on specific problems left unsolved in philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I do this by showing how supplementing empirical, psychological accounts of cognition with a phenomenological approach brings greater clarity and precision to our understanding of the role of temporality in cognition, the dynamic co-constitution of self and other, the tight interrelation between action and awareness, the situatedness of cognition through ecological niche construction, and the genesis of meaning and of a responsiveness to norms in pre-conceptual bodily experience.
Increasingly, I am exploring cross-cultural approaches to understanding some of these core themes in philosophy of mind (esp. in Neo-Confucian and Daoist philosophies). I am particularly excited to further explore the way that the Chinese philosophical tradition provides practices that lead philosophers beyond an abstract, theoretical understanding of the mind, its relation to reality, and its potential for moral cultivation.
My research at the Master’s and Doctoral levels has been funded by SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).