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 defending the enduring relevance of the phenomenological tradition started by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I am interested in classical Husserlian phenomenology’s effort to provide a philosophically rigorous foundation for understanding the relation between consciousness and nature. My focus of phenomenological research is centered on the interrelation between time-con…
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 defending the enduring relevance of the phenomenological tradition started by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I am interested in classical Husserlian phenomenology’s effort to provide a philosophically rigorous foundation for understanding the relation between consciousness and nature. My focus of phenomenological research is centered on the interrelation between time-consciousness, self-consciousness, norm-consciousness and agency (especially as evinced in skilled, effortless and spontaneous action).
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 draw on Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness in order to formulate an account of altered self-consciousness in autotelic experience, which is experience that we value for its own sake. Such experience has been central to various accounts of well-being 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 phenomenological 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. 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.
