A report by Amy Kind

Rewind to one year ago.  In October 2023, a group of folks interested in imagination convened for a two-day workshop hosted by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.  We were brought together by Erik Viirre and Cassi Vieten with the aim of discussing their “Atlas of Imagination," a project that maps various dimensions of imagination and differentiates it from adjacent constructs.  Workshop participants represented a variety of different disciplinary perspectives as well as a variety of occupations; in addition to philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, there were also academics who focus on imagination in teaching contexts like engineering, plus a number of practitioners who attend to imagination in their work on topics such as sonification, world-building, veteran affairs, or climate change.  Over the course of that workshop, not only was considerable conceptual progress made but, perhaps just as importantly, some deep personal and scholarly connections were forged.  And by the end of the two days, WIN – the World Imagination Network – was officially launched.

The Junkyard will be on hiatus for the winter break.  We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings.  Our best wishes for a restorative winter break, and we look forward to lots of great posts on imagination in 2024!

A conference report by Amy Kind

How do we distinguish imagination and reality?  How do visual content and social context influence pictorial meaning?  What role does mental imagery play in belief?  And how do you make room in your refrigerator when you need to fit in a bunch of leftovers after a large social gathering?  These are just a few of the many questions addressed at the Second Salzburg Workshop on Imagistic Cognition, held last week.  Organized by Christopher Gauker (University of Salzburg) and Bence Nanay (Antwerp) as part of their Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition project (jointly funded by the Austrian FWF and the Belgian FWO), the workshop brought together 12 speakers drawn from disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience for three days of productive dialogue about the nature and extent of imagistic cognition.

The Junkyard will be on hiatus for the next few weeks.  We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings.  We have some exciting things on tap for 2022, including book symposia on The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition (edited by Patrick Engisch and Julia Langkau) and Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination (edited by Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran).

As always, if you have suggestions for people whom we should contact to write for us, or if you'd like to write something for us yourself, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Our best wishes for a restful and restorative break and a happy new year!

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.

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The Skill of Perspective Taking: Commentary from Amy Kind

It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to comment on Heidi Maibom’s recently published book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, which I read with great interest, and from which I learned a lot. Calling upon an extensive array of empirical research, personal anecdotes, and examples ranging from Shakespeare to de Beauvoir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Maibom develops an account of empathy in terms of perspective taking, and much of the book is devoted to developing an account of what perspectives are and how perspective taking works. In short, on Maibom’s view, to take someone else’s perspective requires us to recenter ourselves away from ourself and towards that person.

As usual, The Junkyard will be on summer break for July and most of August. But even during the blog’s hiatus, the quest for imagination domination continues. We know that many Junkyarders will be busy speaking at conferences like this one in Austria on Reductive Explanations of Imagination or this one in Grenoble on Simulationism.

As always, we would be happy to hear your suggestions for future posts. If you are interested in writing for us, please feel free to get in touch by email.

We’ll be back in late August with a great set of new posts, including some exciting book symposia (stay tuned for more details!). Have a happy summer, and go Team Imagination!

A post by Amy Kind

There has been a huge amount of work on imagination published recently. There’s no way we could cover it all in this roundup, so we have limited ourselves to ten articles that have recently been published – articles that range across a variety of topics relating to imagination: pretense, empathy, continuism about memory and imagination, the i-desire debate, and much more!

A post by Amy Kind.

As hard as it may be to believe, this coming weekend is the fifth birthday of The Junkyard. We ran our first post on April 3, 2017. When Eric Peterson first approached me to ask what I thought of the idea of our collaborating on a blog devoted to imagination, I was a bit skeptical. Were there enough of us imagination folk out there to make it work? Would such a blog really be sustainable? It turns out that the answer to both questions has proved to be a resounding yes, and I’m very glad I overcame my initial skepticism to take on this labor of love.

There has been a veritable explosion of scholarly work on imagination as of late! We can’t list it all, but below we list many of the papers and books on imagination that have been published since our previous roundup about a year ago.

(In our last update, we included some forthcoming work. We don’t repeat those entries here. Note also that because of the vast amount of recently published work we have decided not to include forthcoming work in this round-up – we list only work that has already been published, including online first publication.)

As denizens of The Junkyard know, we normally post new content on Wednesdays. A few weeks ago, when I realized that this meant that we would be due to post new content on the morning after election day (should that have caps? In my head, it seems like it should say: The Morning After), I knew it couldn’t be business as usual. And so here’s what we decided to do. I wrote to some friends of the blog, scholars of imagination all, and asked them to engage in some imaginings themselves. The simple instruction: Imagine the world we’ll wake up to on November 4. Other than asking them to focus on the world we will wake up to, and not on the world we hope we will wake up to, I gave them free rein. And I gave them a deadline of today, October 29.

Here’s what they came up with.

In this post, we list some scholarly works on imagination that have been published since our previous update. Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!

A report by Amy Kind.

Last spring, in a video called “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,”  a graying and much older AOC recounts how the country was finally able to achieve environmental reforms.  As she rides the bullet train from NY to DC several decades from now, she recalls the diverse group of people who took congressional office in 2019.  Young people of color across the country were finally able to see themselves reflected in their political leaders.  This gave rise to new hopes and dreams for, as AOC notes, it’s often said that “you can’t be what you can’t see.”  And this leads her to draw an analogy to the Green New Deal.  The criticisms that arose when it was first proposed came from the fact that people just couldn’t picture it yet.  After telling the story of how significant reforms were finally enacted, she notes that:  “The first big step was just closing our eyes and imagining.”

The Junkyard will be on summer break until late August.  We will return on August 21 with new weekly postings.  You can check out our lineup for Fall 2019 on our Upcoming Posts page.

As always, we would be happy to hear your suggestions for future posts.  If you are interested in writing for us, please feel free to get in touch by email.

Have a happy summer, and go Team Imagination!

A post by Amy Kind

Today we celebrate The Junkyard’s second birthday.  A year ago, I reported some stats on The Junkyard’s first year.  At that time, there had been about 9K unique visitors to the blog.  We’ve had similar traffic in year two.  As of the writing of this post, there have been over 18K unique visitors to the blog.  These visitors have come from over 50 different countries.  Though the vast majority of our visitors have come from the United States and the UK, we also seem to receive a fair amount of traffic from (in order): Canada, Israel, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Italy.

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s recent book:  Supposition and the Imaginative Realm (Routledge, 2018).  See here for an introduction from Margherita.  Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.

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Commentary from Amy Kind.

It’s a pleasure to be taking part in this symposium on Margherita Arcangeli’s Supposition and the Imaginative Realm, a book that is sure to generate much interest and discussion.  As Margherita indicated in her opening post [insert link] for the symposium, she ultimately defends a view according to which supposition is a sui generis type of imagination, in particular, it is acceptance-like imagination.  Though such a view had previously been hinted at by authors such as Kevin Mulligan, as far as I know Margherita is the first to develop this kind of view in detail.

The Junkyard will be on hiatus for the next month.  We will return in mid-January with new weekly postings.

Below we list some scholarly works on imagination that have recently been published (see also our previous roundups here and here).  Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!

Below we list some scholarly work on imagination that have been published since our last round-up a year ago.  Please feel free to add additional references in the comments!

A post by Amy Kind.

Recently at a conference someone remarked to me that since I’d gotten my PhD back in 1997 – actually, he might have said “way back” – I must have been working on imagination before it became a hot topic in philosophy.  And imagination has indeed lately become hot.   Though the subject was largely ignored by philosophers throughout most of the twentieth century, it has been the subject of dramatically increased attention over the last twenty-five to thirty years – and especially so over the last decade or so.  This chance remark – in addition to reminding me how old I’ve become – got me reflecting on how, exactly, we've gotten to this point, that is, how did imagination come to be as hot as it has become?  So I thought I'd use this blog post in an effort to try to answer this question.