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 Dominic Gregory

The current book develops a powerful and wide-ranging case for the importance of mental imagery throughout the mental realm, one that builds upon a distinctively non-phenomenological—and instead neurofunctional—conception of what mental imagery is most fruitfully understood to be. It is written in Bence’s characteristically straightforward but stylish prose, and it is packed with interesting arguments that are richly informed by relevant empirical work, arguments whose conclusions are brought to bear upon a wide variety of concerns.

A post by Dominic Gregory.

One idea that pops up every now and again, in philosophical thinking about perception, is that the imagination plays a part in ordinary vision. Here is a natural starting-point for that idea: we often experience the things that we see as having properties that we don’t literally see to be instantiated.