My dissertation is called: “Self-Making In Time: A Phenomenological Account of the Temporality and Normativity of Self-Constitution In Autotelic States.” In this work, I provide a phenomenological account of autotelic experience, which is a state that contains its goal within itself and that we value for its own sake. Such experience has been central to various accounts of well-being and the good life, ranging from the Eudaimonist philosophical tradition which describes virtue as an autotelic state, to the positive psychology of Csikszentmihalyi, which characterizes flow states (i.e. states of absorbed, effortless action and attention) as autotelic. However, in spite of the centrality of autotelicity to both the moral and psychological approaches to well-being, very little theoretical work has been done so far that clarifies how the moral and psychological senses of the concept of autotelicity relate. My dissertation aims to fill this gap. It provides a Husserl-inspired account of autotelic states which describes their norm-governed temporal micro-structure and explains how such states iterated across time can reshape our sense of self, thereby providing the basis for practices of moral self-cultivation.
My project also shows how a phenomenological approach can solve key conceptual problems that bedevil the psychological literature on flow by bringing greater clarity and precision in our definition and description of this phenomenon. The upshot is a better understanding of what the empirical evidence has to say about what well-being is, how flow states contribute to it, and how the psychological and moral self-cultivation literatures can be brought into dialogue in order to provide a unified account of well-being qua autotelic experience.
In addition, I am also engaged in a number of other projects each of which, in its own way, shows the ongoing relevance of phenomenology for contemporary philosophy of mind and philosophy of science.
Paper Abstracts
Paper on Altered Self-Consciousness in Flow (title removed for blind review)
One of the key markers of the so-called flow state, as described in positive psychology, is a seeming loss or diminishment of our ordinary consciousness of self. However, psychologists and philosophers have provided various inconsistent interpretations of what this feature of the flow state amounts to. Some, like Jay Garfield in his work Losing Ourselves, (2022) have argued that loss of self-consciousness in flow supports a no-self account of experience as ultimately selfless, authorless, and ownerless. I argue against Garfield’s interpretation and show that flow states are not cases of loss of self-consciousness 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.
Works in Progress
Scientific Representation as Embodied Imaginative Orientation: A Phenomenological Account of Visualization and Diagram Use in Scientific Practice
This paper builds on my 2019 conference paper, “Representation as Sensorimotor Orientation: The Role of Non-Propositional, Spatial Simulation in Scientific Representation.” While the previous paper drew on embodied, extended philosophy of mind to argue that biologists’ prolific use of diagrams enjoins us to recognize the constitutive role played by images in scientific representation, this paper develops a phenomenological account of scientific visualization that draws on Husserlian phenomenology and on Sartre’s The Imaginary in order to explain how scientists’ diagram use fleshes out the meaning of key scientific concepts. I describe how a process of visualization scaffolded by diagram use can facilitate eidetic intuition, or the intuitive grasp of invariant structures and patterns in biological phenomena.
Phenomenological Explanation and First Philosophy
Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in reconceptualizing phenomenology as an explanatory rather than a merely descriptive discipline. These recent accounts have done much to bring greater precision to our understanding of the relation between explanation in phenomenology and the specialized sciences of mind (particularly cognitive science). However, while conceiving of phenomenology in relation to the empirical sciences can lead us part of the way towards understanding its explanatory role, I argue that it fails to take us the whole way. Instead, such accounts sidestep phenomenology’s relation to first philosophy which, as Husserl argued, is the ultimate context within which phenomenology’s explanatory status can be understood. In this paper, I provide an account of the basic logic of phenomenological explanation which serves to more distinguish it from metaphysical explanation via grounding relations. I formulate the explanatory logic implicitly deployed within the Husserlian phenomenological method and argue that phenomenology is explanatory insofar as it deploys a three-step method which I articulate.
Invited Chapters
Circling Around the Transcendental: the Conscious Subject as the Limit of Nature in Raymond Tallis’ Philosophy and in Phenomenology – Forthcoming with Palgrave, January 2026.
A recurring theme of Raymond Tallis’ philosophical work is a sustained critique of the conceptual limits of scientific naturalism. In my contribution, I explore how Tallis’s critique of the methodological and ontological projects of naturalism taps into a historic pattern of argument that can be traced back to a lineage that runs through phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl all the way back to Imannuel Kant. My goal is to show that Tallis’ philosophy of the conscious subject, with its focus on intentionality and on the critique of reductive, causal accounts of mind, is situated at the threshold of transcendental philosophy insofar as it understands consciousness as a condition of possibility of meaning and knowledge. Moreover, I propose that once Tallis’ tacit alliance with transcendental modes of thinking is recognized, promising avenues for developing a positive alternative to naturalism are disclosed.
I argue that key Tallisian arguments, insofar as they have force as in-principle arguments against scientific naturalism, must be capable of addressing the (by now commonplace) objection that whatever the current shortcomings of our best scientific models of consciousness, these shortcomings do not foreclose the possibility that the future progress of science may yet yield a satisfactory reductive account of consciousness. Moreover, I argue that in order to address this objection, Tallis’ arguments must be interpreted as transcendental arguments. I then argue that in order to sustain the autonomy of philosophy as an independent source of self-knowledge vis-a-vis science, as I take Tallis to endeavour to do, Tallis must provide an ontological account of consciousness that secures its transcendental status in a way that blocks moves to relativize it. I conclude by discussing how Husserlian phenomenology provides one way of addressing this sort of objection by endorsing an ontological commitment to transcendental idealism.