Audio recordings, slides, papers, and/or handouts are available for most of these talks. Please reach out for access to them.
Peer-Reviewed Conference Presentations: Recent and Upcoming
“Eternity in an Hour”: The Incomplete Completeness of Well-Being as Autotelic Experience
In this talk, I introduce what I call “the puzzle of autotelic experience”: autotelic experience appears as both intrinsically valuable (i.e. the experience is its own reward) and as valuable only insofar as it orients the subject to a self-transcendent source of value. Drawing on Strasser’s Husserl-inspired phenomenology of happiness and on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of time, I give a phenomenological account of autotelic experience that dissolves this puzzle. read more
Group Flow as Spontaneous Collective Agency: A Phenomenological Account
Drawing on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology, I give a phenomenological account of the intentional structures that jointly constitute group flow. This account explains how individual agents’ sense of efficacy can be transformed by their sense of oneness with others. It also allows us to understand the phenomenology of encounters in which a transformative meeting of minds is achieved. read more
Experience For Its Own Sake: Towards a Phenomenology of Autotelic Experience and Well-being
I argue that understanding well-being is a phenomenological problem since the inherent normativity of states of well-being can be elucidated through phenomenological description. Moreover, I provide a phenomenological account of well-being as an autotelic state… read more
Self-Shaping Actions: A Phenomenological Account of Flow States
Drawing on Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness, I provide an account of flow as self-shaping action. This account explains how the autotelic structure of flow functions as a source that motivates the development of the autotelic self over time. read more
I argue that the oft-neglected transcendental philosophy of Ernst Cassirer provides us with the conceptual resources we need to surpass the current deadlock between realists and illusionists by enabling us to recognize that the entire debate is misframed given that consciousness is neither a datum, nor a posit, but is instead the general condition for the intelligibility of particulars. read more
I argue that the contingency of visual imagery does not rule out its constitutive role since it forms an integral part of scientists’ sensorimotor coupling with the world. Furthermore, I argue that scientists’ reliance on imagery and spatial simulation shows that there is a crucial non-propositional and perceptual component at work in scientific representation. read more
Workshop Presentations
Collective Agency in Group Flow States: A Phenomenological Account
This presentation motivated a Merleau-Ponty-inspired phenomenological account of collective agency in group flow states. read more
Can AI Be Transcendental Subjects? A Husserlian Perspective
In my talk, I defended recent arguments that current LLMs do not meet the criteria for agency identified by enactive cognitive science. I then argued that current AI models are not the kinds of entities that could instantiate the fundamental structure of time consciousness that Husserl calls “the living present.” read more