This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Bence Nanay’s recent book Mental Imagery (Oxford University Press, 2023). See here for an introduction from Bence. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Commentary from Margherita Arcangeli

In 1969 Alan Richardson wrote, in the foreword of his Mental Imagery, that the time was ripe for a synthesis of the work done in psychology and philosophy on mental imagery and the aim of his book was “to serve as a guide to research in this field until a more comprehensive treatment becomes available”. Bence Nanay’s Mental Imagery offers us a new compass for navigating a prolific research topic that, despite its fluctuating fortunes, is still engaging the concurrent efforts of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists.

The book shows how mental imagery connects to almost all major mental capacities (perception, action, imagination, memory, desire, emotion). I necessarily have to narrow down the scope of my commentary by focusing on the relationship between mental imagery and imagination. I take it that although Bence frees mental imagery from imagination, the latter is, in his view, still dependent on the former. While I agree with the first claim, I am more sceptical about the second.

A post by Margherita Arcangeli

Sometimes it is a good time to take stock: at the end of the year, when some anniversary is coming up, but also after a long summer break.

I have been recently prompted to reflect on what has been done on imagination over the last few years: an impressive amount of work! Trying to summarise what scholars have recently written about the imagination may seem like trying to empty the sea with a spoon: an impossible and vain task. So I started to look for a useful compass to navigate the growing literature, and a powerful analogy advanced by Anna Abraham in the concluding note to The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination gave me a hint. She points out that imagination bears striking similarities with water:

“Imagination can manifest in wildly different forms from the tangible to the intangible. Its workings range from calm and predictable to volatile and unpredictable. It is a fundamental part of our physiological make-up, permeating our very being, and it is essential to our mental life. It is nourishing and constructive yet can also be overwhelming and destructive. It is quiet. It is dogged. It shapes. It wields. It fits. It flows. It pushes against fault lines. It breaks away. It lacks definition, yet it is formidable.” (Abraham 2020: 814)

I realized that comparing imagination to water can help us see different attitudes scholars have taken, and may take, towards it. At least three categories can be recognised: 1) imagination chemists, 2) imagination engineers, and 3) “imaginographers”.

This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). See here for an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.

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Engaging with Artefacts of Legal Inquiry has been a formative training for my imaginative abilities. With remarkable care and rigour, Maks Del Mar brings readers into the realm of adjudication and invites them (especially in the second part of the book) to play with him by exploiting their imaginations. Instead of abstractly theorizing about the imagination, Del Mar aims at showing how it works in the specific case of adjudication. In so doing Del Mar outlines a theory of the imagination, but a dynamic one – as he might say (according to him, theorising is an activity with an undeniable contingent and variable character – see §C of the Introduction).

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 Margherita Arcangeli with a list on Quotes and Songs.

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

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The fundamental question that drives my inquiry is: What is supposition? This is a crucial and pressing question, if we consider that while supposition has been frequently invoked as a key notion in many philosophical debates in different domains (e.g., aesthetics, logic, phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science), we lack a consensual characterisation of supposition. There is a tendency to contrast supposition with imagination, but most of the time this is not premised on a detailed analysis. It may well be, indeed, that supposition is rather a type of imagination. The book offers an extensive analysis of supposition that does justice to its place in the architecture of the mind. My main goal is to show that there are good arguments in favour of the view that supposition is a type of imagination, but that these very arguments also suggest that supposition is a specific type of imagination, distinct from other varieties of imagination recognised by the literature.

A post by Margherita Arcangeli.

A key notion in many discussions on imagination is that of imagining something “from the inside”. Wollheim (1974) underlined that such a notion is so abused in philosophy, that one might not trust it. Although imagining from the inside can be intuitively interpreted as imagining involving a “point of view” or perspective within the imaginative scene, this notion deserves much more attention, since it can yield different and more technical meanings. The main goal of this post is precisely to rehabilitate this notion by disentangling three meanings which, I think, often overlap, and are even confused in philosophical debates.

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Kathleen Stock's recent book:  Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017).  See here for Kathleen's introduction.  Additional commentaries and replies will run each day this week.

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Commentary from Margherita Arcangeli: Only Suppose

I am very happy to have had the chance to take a critical look at Kathleen Stock’s just-published book Only Imagine. During the Symposium I focused on the last chapter of the book, which touches on topics that are at the centre of my philosophical interests. In “Back to the Imagination”, Stock offers a new account of supposition. In my commentary I will consider how her account relates to other views about supposition.