The Phenomenology of Flow, Well-Being, Autotelic and Self-Transcendent Experience
My dissertation develops a phenomenological account of the structure of autotelic experience (i.e. intrinsically rewarding experience), particularly as exemplified in the so-called flow state, which is a state of absorption in effortless, spontaneous action. Flow is also a self-transcendent experience of oneness insofar as it involves a dissolution of the boundaries between the self, other agents and the world. My dissertation focuses on explicating the crucial roles played by altered self-experience, time-consciousness and norm-consciousness in constituting such experiences. My overarching goal is to provide a phenomenological account of the structure of autotelic states that explicates how they contribute to well-being and self-cultivation. read more
Paper Abstracts
Paper on the Phenomenology of Collective Agency in Group Flow (Revise and Resubmit)
Abstract coming soon.
Paper on Altered Self-Consciousness in Flow States (title removed for blind review)
I argue that flow states are not cases of loss of self-consciousness (as is commonly argued) but are rather instances of altered self-consciousness. I give a Husserl-inspired phenomenological account of the experiential structures that jointly constitute this altered and diminished sense of self-consciousness. read more
Invited Chapters
Circling Around the Transcendental: the Conscious Subject as the Limit of Nature in Raymond Tallis’ Philosophy and in Phenomenology – Forthcoming in The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophical Humanism of Raymond Tallis, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter reconstructs and critically assesses Raymond Tallis’ critique of scientific naturalist accounts of consciousness, which for all their diversity share a basic commitment to explaining consciousness by reifying it. My aim is to bolster Tallis’ critique of naturalism by drawing on the theoretical resources of Husserlian phenomenology. read more
Works in Progress
Distorting Agency: A Phenomenological Critique of Active Inference Accounts of Action in Flow
In this paper, I use phenomenology to show how recent Active Inference accounts of the flow state fail to individuate the intentional and temporal structures that constitute skilled agency in flow. I then argue that their failure in this regard is indicative of more general issues with the fundamental assumptions Predictive Processing accounts have concerning the structural principles that individuate cognitive agents. read more
Experience For Its Own Sake: Towards a Phenomenology of Well-Being
In this paper, I illustrate how phenomenology can bring greater clarity and precision to our folk concept of well-being. I introduce the task of understanding well-being as a phenomenological problem by explaining how (1) states of well-being must be individuated in terms of their invariant experiential structures before they can become targets of empirical description and explanation, and (2) the inherent normativity of occurrent states of well-being can be elucidated through phenomenological description. read more
Imagining the Brain: A Phenomenology of the Neuroscientific Imagination
This paper gives a phenomenological account of scientific imagination and visualization which focuses on how neuroscientists use diagrams to understand the brain as a multi-level, hierarchically-organized structure. read more
Early stages work-in-progress:
- an article that explores how Husserlian phenomenology enjoins us to rethink the hard problem of consciousness;
- an article that explores whether, and in what sense, neurophenomenology is based on a category mistake;
- a paper on phenomenological explanation that explores the sense in which Husserlian phenomenology functions as “first philosophy” by enjoining us to rethink what counts as an explanatory first principle.
Feel free to reach out for drafts or discussion!