Book Symposium: Liao Commentary and Reply

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Remaking Space for Justice, Literally

If imagination is the junkyard of the mind, then political imagination constitutes an especially messy area within it. Although the concept is often invoked, it is also often invoked in highly heterogeneous ways. What are philosophers of imagination to do with such a confusing concept?

In carving out a role for imagination in social movements, an innovation of Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice is to turn what looks like a bug—the heterogeneity of imagination—into a feature. As she puts it, “the heterogeneity of imaginative activities and processes cannot undermine the projects of social movements because those projects actually presuppose that heterogeneity” (2022: 130). She accepts that there is a heterogenous set of activities and processes—which draw on different combinations of cognitive, affective, and volitional capacities, and often from different people—that generate the ideas, images, stories, and experiences that together constitute products of imagination. And it is these imaginative products, not their antecedent activities or processes, that play an important role in social change.

We will get to these imaginative products. But to start, I want to situate Moody-Adams’s account within the broader philosophy of imagination literature.

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Notes on Peter Langland-Hassan on Imagining and Remembering

A post by Shen-yi Liao

Overview

Is imagining continuous with remembering? In recent years, this (dis)continuity debate has received much attention from philosophers of memory (including on The Junkyard: here and here. In a collection of forthcoming works—

Peter Langland-Hassan shows how philosophers of imagination can contribute too. With his characteristic analytic acumen, Langland-Hassan’s forthcoming works clarify and advance the debate about the relationship between imagining and remembering.

In this debate, nearly all agree that ‘remembering’ refers to episodic memory.[1] But what does ‘imagining’ refer to? Langland-Hassan rightfully points out that philosophers of memory are not always precise about what they mean by ‘imagining’. And this is a serious problem because the nature of imagination is highly contested. On the rough characterization that to imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are, there are at least three dimensions of variation: modal, temporal, and subjectual. Most relevant to this debate are imaginings along the first two dimensions: specifically, episodic counterfactual thoughts and episodic future thoughts.

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Five Top Fives: Imaginative Edible Concoctions of the Decade

As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit.  We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination.  There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations.  We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week.  Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings. Today is Sam Liao with a list on Imaginative Edible Concoctions of the Decade.

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Incrementalist Imagination

A post by Shen-yi Liao.

1.        To Change the World, Imagine Differently

Nothing is more free than the imagination of man, said Hume. We use imagination as our tool for accessing possibilities other than the actual, times other than the present, and perspectives other than our own. Imagination’s power takes us beyond things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are.

Given this power, it is no surprise that imagination often comes up in discussions about how to ameliorate our social ills. Imagination lets us transcend reality, to travel to a better world in our heads, a world that we might one day make. “Moral imagination”, “political imagination”, or whatever its name, the thought remains the same: to change the world, imagine differently.

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Update to the SEP Entry on Imagination

A post by Shen-yi Liao.

As you may have seen by now, there is a new Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on imagination. (For comparison, you can still access the archived old entry.) In this post—speaking only for myself—I want to talk about the main changes and their rationales; and also invite this blog’s community for suggestions for further improving this resource.

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Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Imagination?

A post by Shen-yi Liao.

The introductory post to this blog tells a brief history of the philosophy of imagination. From Aristotle’s time to ours, the imagination has been asked to explain mindreading, pretense, engagement with the arts, modal epistemology, etc. And, not surprisingly, there remain little agreement about its nature.

In this post, I want to zoom in the timeline and ask: What has changed in the philosophical study of imagination in the last 10 years or so? To operationalize the question, you might take a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on imagination and ask: What has changed since that snapshot? What are the entry points from philosophical subfields or cognate areas? What are some general tendencies? Which new discussions have emerged? Which discussions seem to be maturing, or even becoming stale?

This post is more of a bleg than a blog. I’ll offer my own—no doubt esoteric—answers. But my primary interest is in learning from the community’s response.

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