Elena Holmgren

I am a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of British Columbia where I work with Evan Thompson. My general research interest lies in exploring the enduring relevance of the phenomenological tradition started by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophy of mind. Moreover, I am interested in phenomenology’s sustained critique of scientific naturalism. Above all, I am interested in classical Husserlian phenomenology’s attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous theoretical foundation for explaining the relation between consciousness and nature and for formulating the problem of consciousness.

More specifically, I bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on specific problems left unsolved in philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I do this by showing how supplementing 4E accounts of cognition with a phenomenological approach brings greater clarity and precision to our understanding of the relation between time-consciousness, self-consciousness, norm-consciousness and agency (especially as evinced in skilled, effortless and spontaneous action). Increasingly, I am exploring parallel cross-cultural approaches to understanding these core themes in philosophy of mind (esp. in Neo-Confucian and Daoist philosophies).

My dissertation is called: "Self-Making In Time: A Phenomenological Account of the Temporality and Normativity of Self-Constitution In Flow States." In this work, I draw on Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness in order to formulate an account of the multi-level, norm-regulated temporal structure of altered self-experience in the flow state initially identified in the positive psychology of Csikszentmihalyi. This, I propose, allows us to understand what wellbeing and optimal experience are as well as enabling us to rethink the norms of moral self-cultivation.