Explaining Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-0-19-890438-0
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 499 g

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Langland-Hassan, Peter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophie des Geistes, Neurophilosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: Explaining Imagination

- 2: Folk Psychology and Its Ontology

- 3: Imagistic Imagining Part I: Imagery, Attitude Imgaining, and Recreative Imagining

- 4: Imagistic Imagining Part II: Hybrid Structure, Multiple Attitudes, and Daydreams

- 5: Conditional Reasoning Part I: Three Kinds of Conditionals and the Psychology of the Material Conditiona

- 6: Conditional Reasoning Part II: Indicatives, Subjunctives, and the Ramsey Test

- 7: Pretense Part I: Recovering Fictional Truths

- 8: Pretense Part II: Psychology

- 9: Consuming Fictions Part I: Recovering Fictional Truths

- 10: Consuming Fictions Part II: The Operator Claim

- 11: Consuming Fictions Part III: Immersion, Emotion, and the Paradox of Fiction

- 12: Creativity

Über Autor(innen)

Peter Langland-Hassan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis, and holds a PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center, and a BA in philosophy from Columbia University. His published work spans the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and empirical psychology. He was a co-editor and contributor to Inner Speech: New Voices (OUP, 2018).