Explaining Imagination

Auteur
Peter Langland-Hassan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis, and holds a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center, and a BA in philosophy from Columbia University. His published work spans the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and empirical psychology. He was a co-editor and contributor to Inner Speech: New Voices (OUP, 2018).

Texte du rabat

Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions.

Résumé
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or processone with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental statesjudgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.