Habitual Being
What makes who you are and what you do so typically you? Is it how much you have thought about your motives? Or is it about your habits and skills?
Studies in cognitive science and social psychology show us an image of humans as fragmented minds. Much of our cognition is fast, unconscious, inaccessible to us as agents. Yet this is not how we experience ourselves, or how we think about ourselves and others.
But that doesn’t mean we should lean to the other side of the dichotomy and understand ourselves as purely intellectual, thinking beings. That would be a caricature image too.
In my work I try to combine these insights and think about humans as both intellectual and habitual.
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in understanding individual and collective human agency at a fundamental level. This is reflected in my primary research areas: philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and the cognitive sciences; and in my focus on the intersection of philosophical and psychological work on joint action, automaticity, and skillful action.