–Oct. 2025 – International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM), Virtual Conference
–Jul. 2025 – The Spontaneity of Freedom Summer Workshop, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Abstract: When a philosophical debate goes well, the conversation spontaneously takes on a life of its own. Participants experience their thoughts and actions as progressively intertwined with those of others, surprising each other by completing one another’s sentences. Their sense of agency transforms as they experience a shared ownership of action wherein the group drives the action. This exemplifies a form of collective agency described in positive psychology as group flow: a state of intensified efficacy coupled with diminished individual ownership and heightened shared ownership of action. Group flow reveals an under-theorized dimension of the sense of agency: an experience in which the source of one’s agency is a sense of oneness rather than individual autonomy. 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.