PhD student in Philosophy at Harvard University
AOS: Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics
AOC: Philosophy of Science, Ethics, Aesthetics, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of AI/Technology
My research interests lie broadly in contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics, especially where the fields overlap with philosophy of science and aesthetics.
abigailtulenko@g.harvard.edu
I believe that research and teaching have a symbiotic relationship. You can learn more about my teaching here.
My dissertation (in progress) argues that experience has a fundamental middle-level structure— neither the collection of independent atoms that a certain kind of scientific naturalism assumes, nor the totalizing whole that many phenomenal holists defend. The basic units of experiential structure are clusters of phenomenal properties bound by relations of essential mutual dependence: what I call phenomenal constellations.
I argue that what draws certain phenomenal properties into essential dependence with each other is an aesthetic relation. Specifically, constellations are bound by relations of harmony or disharmony, which I define cross-modally and operationally. Aesthetic organization, on this view, is constitutive of the fundamental structure of experience. I am a Platonist at heart, and see myself as working in the broader tradition that insists on asking, together, what is good, true, and beautiful, and how the three might be the same question.
These questions press outward into philosophy of science. How does the structure of experience accord with or diverge from the structure of the fundamental physical world? How does this bear, if at all, on the question of how the mental is related to the physical? More broadly, I am interested in questions of structure and the relationship between unity and multiplicity. Are there objective “joints” in nature, and do the laws of nature track them? What might quantum entanglement tell us about the “oneness” of existence? How does consciousness come to exist in human sized bundles? Are atoms conscious? Is the whole of reality conscious?
In ethics, I am drawn to questions of attention, witness, and acknowledgment. What does it mean to really see another person: to attend to them in the way Iris Murdoch means when she calls for "a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality"? These questions connect to my interest in the phenomenology of experience — attention is, among other things, a structural feature of consciousness— but they open into ethics and political philosophy in ways I am still working out. I am interested in acknowledgment and its failures as they bear on political life — in what it means to witness rather than merely observe, and in anti-carceral approaches to justice as a domain where these questions have urgent practical stakes.
A paper in progress pursues this problem through Stanley Cavell and the Islamic concept of shahid. Cavell argues that skepticism about other minds is not merely an epistemic problem but an ethical one, and proposes acknowledgment as a response. I argue that the Islamic concept of shahid (at once, witness, testimony, & martyrdom) resolves a deep puzzle in Cavell's account by reorienting acknowledgment's epistemic structure: shifting focus from the individual acknowledger's possession of knowledge to one's role as embodied evidence within an intersubjective testimonial network.
Running through all of my work is an animating preoccupation: what is it like to be a conscious creature in a physical world, why is it like anything at all, and what does the answer require of our view of science, our ethics, and our account of what is real?
Works in Progress — Phenomenal Constellations: Toward an Account of Experiential Structure (dissertation) — "Rose for Rose, Violet for Violet: On the Duplication of Phenomenal Experience" (manuscript) — "Phenomenal Holism and the Problem of Comparison" (in progress) — "The Furniture, Whatever It May Be: Mary Shepherd as Strong Agnostic Epistemic Structural Realist" (in progress) — "Plato Against Punishment: Deterrence as 'Shadow' Education" (in progress) — "Cavellian Acknowledgment and Islamic Witness (شاهد)" (in progress) — "Ibn Sina and E-Personhood: A Medieval Philosopher on Artificial Intelligence" (developing from talk)
Public Philosophy — "Folklore is Philosophy," Aeon, 2024 — "What Philosopher Ibn Sina Can Teach Us About AI," Scientific American, 2024 — "Is Beauty Natural?" Aeon, 2024 — "Here's What Physics Tells Us About Barbie's World," Scientific American, 2023