A post by Amy Kind
Today we celebrate the first birthday of The Junkyard! We’re very pleased with how our first year went. We have thus far featured Wednesday posts from 41 different authors – scholars ranging from philosophers to psychologists to legal scholars. We’ve also run a book symposium, a roundup of recent work on imagination, and a conference report. There were about 9K unique visitors to our blog in its first year, and almost 23K page views.
Read MoreThe Junkyard will be on hiatus for the next month. We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings. We have an exciting lineup for 2018, with posts from Saam Trivedi, Dennis Sepper, Heidi Maibom, Samuel Kampa, Emine Hande Tuna, James Young, Jennifer McMahon, Anna Abraham, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Claudia Passos, Dan Cavedon-Taylor, Daniel Dor, Michela Summa, Julia Jansen, Kathleen Stock, Shannon Spaulding, Natalie Fletcher, Melvin Chen, Talia Morag, Thomas Szanto, and many more.
Read MorePublished by Oxford University Press, the book series Philosophy of Memory and Imagination is open to monographs on all aspects of memory and imagination. Books included in the series may belong to the philosophy of memory, the philosophy of imagination, or both fields.
Philosophers have a love-hate relationship with the imagination. René Descartes, for one, disparaged it as ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ in answering the most profound questions about the nature of existence. Trying to imagine one’s way towards metaphysical truth, he wrote in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), is as foolish as falling asleep in the hope of obtaining a clearer picture of the world through dreams.
Read MoreBelow we list some scholarly work on imagination published/online first in 2017. Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!
Read MoreWith no substantive post scheduled for this week, we thought we’d take this opportunity to make a few announcements.
Read MoreA post by Amy Kind.
Speaking at a session at the 2015 meeting of the Pacific Division APA, Noel Carroll referred to imagination as “the junkyard of the mind” – a place where everything gets thrown in. Need something to explain our engagement with fiction? Enter imagination. What accounts for our ability to access modal truths? Again, enter imagination. Pretense. Mindreading. Empathy. Thought experiments. Creativity. Delusions. Dreams. Metaphors. Sure, let’s throw all of those onto the imaginative scrap heap as well – a heap that seems to be getting higher and higher.
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