Audio recordings, slides, papers, and/or handouts are available for most of these talks. Please reach out to me for access to them.
Peer-Reviewed Conference Presentations: Recent and Upcoming
“Group Flow as Spontaneous Collective Agency: A Phenomenological Account”
–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.
“Self-Shaping Actions: A Phenomenological Account of Flow States”
–Jan. 2025 – American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Meeting, New York
–Jun. 2024 – Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) meeting, Annual Congress, Montreal, QC
Abstract: The flow state has been a subject of increasing interest in positive psychology and the philosophy of agency. In psychology, flow is described as an autotelic state (i.e. as intrinsically rewarding). Moreover, iterated flow states are said to lead to the development of an autotelic self capable of experiencing its actions as their own reward. Nevertheless, both the autotelic self and its relation to autotelic actions remain undertheorized in the psychological literature. But what must the self be in order to optimally develop through autotelic action? Moreover, just how is it that autotelic actions can fundamentally reshape self-experience? 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.
“Experience For Its Own Sake: Towards a Phenomenology of Autotelic Experience and Well-being“
–Oct. 2025 – Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Virtual Conference
–Oct. 2024 – International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM), Virtual Conference
–Aug. 2024 – The Center For Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract: In this talk, 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 wherein action is its own reward. I then show how it is at a phenomenological level of analysis that we can distinguish between distinct senses in which autotelic experience can carry normative weight. I conclude by giving a Husserl-inspired account of the intentional, temporal micro-structure of autotelic states that allows us to make a principled distinction between the distinct forms of autotelicity evinced in neutral exercises of skill and in actions that facilitate the cultivation of virtue.
“Is Consciousness Fundamental Or Fictive? Why Realists and Illusionists About Consciousness Are Both Wrong”
–Nov. 2021 – Western Canadian Philosophical Association Conference, Victoria, BC
Abstract: In the debate between realists and illusionists, one theorist’s datum is oftentimes another theorist’s fiction. On the one hand, phenomenal realists argue that consciousness, understood as qualia, is the central datum to be explained by any theory of mind worth its salt. On the other hand, illusionists argue that the realists’ concept of consciousness fails to refer to any datum but is instead an antiquated theoretical construct that has long since outlived its usefulness for a science of mind and so should be reconceptualized in terms of third-person neuroscientific evidence. 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.
To read a draft of the above paper, please visit the following: link
“Representation as Sensorimotor Orientation: The Role of Non-Propositional, Spatial Simulation in Scientific Representation”
–Nov. 2019 – Western Canadian Philosophical Association Conference, Lethbridge, Alberta *Winner of the WCPA Best Graduate Student Essay Prize*
Abstract: The pervasive use of images and diagrams in science has recently garnered a great deal of debate in the literature on scientific representation. Bechtel et al. (2013) argue that images aren’t merely contingently useful tools that scientists use in order to communicate scientific findings. Rather, they suggest that images are a constitutive part of scientific theories. This is because images represent worldly mechanisms in ways that draw on scientists’ capacity for spatial simulation. However, the authors’ account seems to be at odds with the fact that the congenitally blind are also capable of spatial simulations despite lacking visual input. I argue in support of Bechtel et al. 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.
Workshop Presentations
Jan. 2025 – “Collective Agency in Group Flow States: A Phenomenological Account” – Vancouver Neurophenomenology Group, Meeting on Agency in the Environment, University of British Columbia
Nov. 2024 – “Can AI Be Transcendental Subjects? A Husserlian Perspective” – Invited speaker for “AI and Consciousness” workshop, James M. Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good, Green College, Vancouver, BC
Abstract: In my talk, I built on Johannes Jaeger’s recent (2024) argument that current LLMs do not meet the criteria for agency identified by Enactive cognitive science. I argued that, in addition to relying on Enactivist descriptions of the structure of agency such as Jaeger’s, we must also use a phenomenological approach in order to identify the criteria that allow us to recognize conscious agency in any given entity. I then argued that transcendental subjectivity (and, in particular, the fundamental structure of time consciousness that Husserl calls “the living present”) is the condition for the possibility of conscious agency. I concluded with an argument that tried to show that current AI models are not the kinds of entities that could instantiate that structure.