The Discovery of Imagination

A post by Avshalom Schwartz 

The safest general characterization of the history of imagination is that it begins with Plato. Indeed, this is a rare point of agreement between scholars—from intellectual historians to analytical philosophers—about what is otherwise a contested and heavily debated concept. According to this standard account, Plato was the first to offer a philosophical investigation of imagination. This position was taken, for example, by Murray Wright Bundy in what is, to this day, the most comprehensive study of imagination in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bundy’s claim that “the history of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ as terms of reflective thought begins with Plato” is echoed in countless other historical and philosophical treatments of this concept (Bundy 1927, 11; cf. Kearney 1988, 87; Jørgensen 2017; Watson 1988, 1; Clifford and Buxton 2023, 4). Aristotle, as this common story goes, was the first to treat this concept systematically—“the first to give a careful delineation of the power of imagination as part of a complex theory of human and animal psychology,” as one commentator has put it (Sepper 2013; See also Schweitzer 1925, 77)—with others going as far as attributing to him the “discovery” of imagination (Castoriadis 1997).

Very few studies of the imagination have examined the pre-Platonic imagination or evaluated the background of his treatment of imagination and the resources on which he drew in developing his philosophical account of this mental faculty. Some have searched among Plato’s philosophical predecessors, focusing on pre-Socratic thinkers such as Thales, the Atomists, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (Ambrosi 1898, 5–9; Bundy 1927, 11–18; Sepper 2013, 107–14). Others took more mythical or aesthetic routes, treating the story of Prometheus and early practice of poetry—including ideas about inspiration and creativity—as pre-theoretical reflections on the human imaginative power (Kearney 1988, 79–80; Jørgensen 2017, 21; Sheppard 2015). But what about the more straightforward, linguistic origins of imagination?

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Why do we rewatch fictions—but not sports?

A post by Neil Van Leeuwen

In the background as I write this blog, the Superbowl is on. The Seahawks currently lead 6-0 in the second quarter, which makes me vaguely happy, since I dislike the Patriots (sorry, not sorry). But I’m not Seahawks fan, so my investment in the game is minimal enough that I can write.

Things are different, of course, for New England and Seattle fans. For them, this game will appear as one of the most riveting things they’ve seen in years. And all told, about 100 million people in the United States, along with about 25 million more around the world, are watching this game.

Of course, the Superbowl and sports in general aren’t the only long viewing people do. Estimates suggest that that average person watches about a movie a week, and then TV shows are in addition to that. Most movies and TV shows are fictional dramas, and plays and musicals fall in that category as well. So the amount of fictional drama that people watch is impressive as well.

Given all that, if you were to ask, “What do people like watching more, sports or fictional drama?” I would have a genuinely hard time answering. We could come at the question from multiple different angles, some of which might put sports on top and others of which might put fictional drama on top.

But there is a related question, concerning which I think the answer is abundantly clear: What do people like rewatching more, sports or fictions?

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Grieving Imagined Futures

A post by Hannah Fasnacht

«Wie geht’s?» fragte die Trauer die Hoffnung.

«Ich bin etwas traurig», sagte die Hoffnung.

«Hoffentlich», sagte die Trauer.

—Franz Hohler

“How are you?” Sadness asked Hope.

“I’m a little sad”, Hope said.

“I would hope so”, said Sadness.

[my translation]

Grief is typically directed at or caused by an actual loss: the death of a person, the end of a relationship, the removal of a certain form of security, for example due to a war, the deprivation of abilities and things once possessed. One could call this kind of grief “past-oriented” and “directed at actual objects”. Mostly, grief is understood as a reaction to a loss – paradigmatically, the loss of someone close to us (Cholbi 2021; Ratcliffe 2020).

Grief seems to be a complex thing. It is not just sadness; rather, it is arguably a process with different emotions which can co-exist, contradict each other, shift into one another, have “stages” (Kübler-Ross 1969) or come in waves.

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Can We Imagine New Emotions?

A post by Irene Lonigro

According to a venerable philosophical tradition, imagination builds upon experiences we have already had (Nagel, 1974; Paul, 2014). I cannot imagine what it feels like to taste a new kind of fruit like a durian until I have that very experience first-hand. We may call this limitation to our imagination the experiential constraint. Tasting a durian for the first time is therefore an ‘epistemically transformative’ experience that was previously inaccessible to us (Paul, 2014: 26).  

More recently, some scholars have questioned the experiential constraint. Following Amy Kind, there is no in principle difficulty in imagining new experiences. We can indeed access new experiences in imagination through ‘imaginative scaffolding’, the process of adding, subtracting and modifying our previous experiences to obtain novel re-combinations in imagination (2020: 137). We can perhaps imagine a new sensory experience like eating a durian by scaffolding out from experiences we have already had.

Now, try to imagine a new example: what it feels like to experience the joy of motherhood if you have never been a mother or to experience nostalgia for the first time. These examples present us with new experiences, this time of an emotional nature. Can we access these experiences via imagination? More generally, can we apply imaginative scaffolding to emotions as well? In this post, I explore whether and how the case of emotions presents a different kind of challenge for imagination compared to other experiences.   

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The world of image

A post by Reza Hadisi

In one of his commentaries, al‑Shahrazūrī (d. ca. 1288) cites and elaborates on an enigmatic passage from Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of the Ishrāqī philosophical movement:

“If you hear of the discussion of the ancients that there is a magnitudinous world in existence, which is not the sensory world nor the intelligible; its cities are countless without end; among them are Jābalqā and Jābarsā… Believe in it!” (trans. Lit 2017)

The passage is cryptic, but for Suhrawardī it is not poetic flourish. He is referring to the notion of the ‘world of image’ [ʿālam al‑mithāl] and its “cities,” which he identifies as a distinct set of mind-independent objects (alongside sensible objects, Platonic forms, and souls). These, for him, are the proper objects of imagination.

Now, not many of us believe in the existence of Jābalqā and Jābarsā, or any other “cities of the world of image.” At best, we might be persuaded by the idea of imaginative construction: that episodes of imagining can generate quasi mental objects, and that these objects can be shared if the “construction script” is sharable. But Suhrawardī and his Ishrāqī commentators mean something far stronger. They do not think we construct these objects. They think we can discover them.

In a recent paper (Hadisi, forthcoming), I try to make sense of this medieval conception of imagination. Some of the reconstruction there is tied to Suhrawardī’s broader metaphysics. Here, I focus on just one basic idea concerning the constitutive norm of imagination.

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Imagination, Autonomy, and Really Big Numbers

A post by Ansley Avis

“It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10?”

-Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development

Imagine an elephant.

Got it? Perfect. How many toenails does it have?

Your elephant probably didn’t give you an answer. That’s okay, it would still be unfair to say that you failed to imagine an elephant. While their toenails are unique, they aren’t necessary to capture what makes an elephant an elephant. You could have thought about a long trunk, big ears and rough, grey skin, a trumpeting noise, or some other combination of features and gotten the gist of it. Even if you have aphantasia, you were presumably able to tell that you were thinking about an elephant, not something else.

Now imagine a trillion dollars. This is how much money Tesla shareholders recently voted to allocate to Elon Musk over the next ten years.

How did you do it? Could you be sure that you were imagining a trillion in a way that would meaningfully set it apart from a billion, or two trillion? If you switch from imagining 1 to 2 trillion, do the changes you make track the actual trillion dollar difference between these numbers?

We can’t imagine a trillion in the same straightforward way that we can an elephant. Our minds just don’t have the resolution necessary to do so. This holds even for legendary thinkers – 400 years ago, René Descartes wrote on the impossibility of imagining a chiliagon, a 1,000 sided polygon. Descartes noted he could at least conceive of a chiliagon; even if he couldn’t accurately picture it, with a little effort he could still understand it intellectually by drawing on his mathematical knowledge. But when we read a story like the one above, how do we intellectually grasp $1,000,000,000,000? This isn’t a shape with clearly defined parameters – it’s untold power. Our failure here is both imaginative and conceptual. If we want to understand the implications of numbers we encounter every day, we have to get creative.

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Delirium, the imagination and altered states

A post by Dorothy Wade

In my work as an intensive care psychologist, I frequently hear from patients about the vivid and frightening experiences they undergo. Bombarded by hallucinations and delusions, their visions and thoughts are inescapably real to them. Often involving bizarre elements such as aliens, medieval monks or cannibals, the episodes could be mistaken for scenes of a horror movie (Wade et al 2014).

Marilyn believed there was a baby factory in the hospital basement. She told me the nurses were manufacturing ‘Frankenstein babies’ with disabilities, as a scam to claim welfare benefits.  She had seen it for herself, and urged me to go and check the basement. Irene saw puffins jumping on the bed next to hers, shooting blood at her from plastic rifles and laughing day and night. She was scared, but didn’t tell staff or family about the gun-toting birds in case they thought she had lost her mind.

Like thousands of seriously ill people in hospital every day, Marilyn and Irene were suffering from an altered state of consciousness known as delirium. In the aftermath they were terrified, both from the experience, and the belief that they were going mad. Delirium is like imagination on steroids (often literally). There seems to be no limit to the ideas, emotions and extraordinary tales the mind can generate in this state. Delirium in ICU results from brain changes caused by illness, medications (sedatives, opioids or steroids) and a disorientating environment. Although usually temporary, the syndrome may leave people with significant cognitive problems and psychological scars.

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Episodic Construction: Compositional or Associative?

A post by Joshua Myers and Johannes Mahr.

Imagination and episodic memory are intimately linked. Imagination draws on previous experience—when picturing yourself on a beach in Portugal sipping mango juice, you will draw on memories of other beaches you’ve visited and other mango juices you’ve had. Conversely, memory involves imaginatively filling in missing detail—when you remember your last trip to the beach you will likely draw on elements from other beach trips to populate the scene.

A popular way to explain the intimate relationship between memory and imagination has been to say that they both rely on a process of episodic construction that (re)combines elements of previous experiences (Addis 2020, Schacter & Addis 2007, Hassabis & Maguire 2007). But it is much less common to cash out the notion of episodic construction or (re)combination in any detail. According to what principles does this process unfold?

We propose that episodic construction should be thought of as a compositional process. More specifically, we defend Episodic Compositionality: the view that episodic construction generates complex episodic representations by combining basic representational elements according to syntactic rules. 

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A Unique Epistemic Value for Imagination?

A post by Eric Peterson

In a recent post on this wonderful blog, Nick Wiltsher discusses three interrelated claims of which he is increasingly sympathetic towards.  These are:

(1) Imagination has no distinctive epistemic ends.

(2) The epistemic ends that can be pursued using imagination are better achieved by other means.

(3) There is, all the same, value in using imagination to pursue (some) epistemic ends.

As he states, claim (3) only matters if (1) and (2) stand up, and he provides some hunches that can be the beginnings of arguments for each standing up.  In this post, I want to explore whether a particular kind of knowledge might put pressure on (1) and (2).

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What is it like to have aphantasia?

A post by Raquel Krempel

Imagine an apple. Nothing happened? You probably have aphantasia.

This is a common way of introducing and thinking about aphantasia. On the web, images such as Figure 1 (below) often serve to illustrate aphantasics’ inability to visualize, represented by the depiction numbered 5.

Aphantasia is characterized as the absence or near absence of mental imagery, most typically visual, but, in many cases, all forms of sensory imagery can be affected (Zeman et al. 2025, Dawes et al. 2024). Global aphantasics report a lack of imagery in all senses, in that not only can they not “see” an apple in their mind’s eye, they also can’t “taste” it, “smell” it, and so on. Various forms of involuntary imagery are also commonly affected in aphantasia, such as imagery formed while reading (Krempel and Monzel 2024). We thus tend to think of aphantasia as a blank mind, often characterizing it in purely negative terms.

Most of the growing body of research on aphantasia concerns the assessment of aphantasics’ performance on behavioral tests, many of them related to episodic and working memory (cf. Monzel et al. 2024, Dawes et al. 2022, Keogh et al. 2021). This interest in the possible impact of aphantasia on memory is not surprising. Given the common belief that imagery plays a crucial role in memory (Nanay 2021a), aphantasia provides a great place to assess this view. The data so far indicate that aphantasia impacts the number of details recalled from a particular past event, but, perhaps surprisingly, aphantasics tend to do well on working memory tasks. A current open question is how aphantasics do that, some suggestions being that they use non-imagistic strategies and that they use unconscious imagery (Zeman 2025, Nanay 2021b).

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The Text-Conditioned Image

A post by Julia Minarik

And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life – or while the machine is recording – will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience…Then life will be a repository for death. 

– Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel.

Do machine-made images have less content than images created by human hands? I think they do, at least insofar as these machines are imaginatively impoverished: they have access only to words and images, far less sensory and emotional modalities than we do. Contemporary image generators – Midjourney, DALL-E and their kin – produce images via generative diffusion conditioned on text or images. To grasp what this limitation means for the content of their art, we must first understand how art arises from and leads the human imagination.

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Are we aware of neural activity in imagination? The attention model of conscious imagery and aphantasia

A post by Jianghao Liu

Please imagine a red Gala apple. Is it darker or lighter than a cherry? Most of us can easily conjure a mental image, a perceptual-like experience that feels almost as if we were seeing it. For centuries, mental imagery has long been considered a core component of consciousness in both philosophy of mind and neuroscience (Nanay, 2023). Yet, emerging evidence from individuals of aphantasia, who report no voluntary imagery (Zeman, 2024), raises a striking question: can there be unconscious mental imagery (Nanay, 2021; Michel et al., 2024)? In this post, I present the attention model (Liu, 2025) of the neural basis of conscious imagery and aphantasia, thereby aiming to bridge empirical neuroscience and philosophical accounts of imagination and awareness.

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Psychedelic visions are immersive mental simulations

A post by Maria Fedorova

In a series of interviews conducted by T. C. Swift and his colleagues on psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in “magic” mushrooms) experiences of cancer patients suffering from depression and anxiety, two patients, Brenda and Victor, reported the following experiences:

Brenda: At one point during her session, she experienced herself floating toward a brick crematorium and concluded that she must have died. After “bouncing off ” the crematorium she found herself under the ground in rich soil:

I felt like this was really dealing with death…I’m in the forest and there’s this beautiful, loamy, woodsy, green, lush kind of woods, and I’m down below the ground…And it felt really, really good, and I thought, “That’s what happens when you die. I am going to be reconnected with this beautiful world. This earthy world that we live in.”...It was just simple. It was gorgeous. (Swift et al. 2017: 500)

Victor: Until this point in the experience, I did not have a body. I was just this kind of soul, this entity…I was shopping for a body, and the only body I could choose was my body. And this is meaningful because I had a lot of body issues associated with being sick with what chemo did to my body and how it changed. And so I was circling my body, and I saw everything that has happened to my body, all the food I have eaten, the drugs I have taken, the alcohol, the people I have had sex with, the chemo, the exercise, everything that has ever happened to my body. I took it in at once. (Swift et al. 2017: 501)

Both of the reports contain references to psychedelic visions. In most general terms, psychedelic visions can be defined as closed-eye visual experiences induced by psychedelics. Such visions usually involve vivid mental imagery, are somewhat narratively structured and emotionally charged.

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Leaving It to the Imagination

A post by Luke Roelofs

There’s a common idea that sometimes the best aesthetic choice is to “leave something to the imagination”, where that primarily means not presenting it explicitly.

Sometimes this is a claim about horror — that the monster is scarier if it stays mostly hidden, and showing it clearly is often a let-down (Lovecraft 1927 famously said that “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”). Sometimes it’s a claim about sexiness – that the most arousing outfit isn’t necessarily the most revealing one, that eroticism can be better served by suggestive hints than graphic depiction. And I think similar dynamics can come up with other emotions: someone’s tragic backstory might seem more tragic if given only through vague suggestions, a perfect day might seem more perfect if we’re not fully shown what happened. And so on.

But what are we actually doing — what is the “imagination” that things are being left to?

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How to boost imagination and emotional well-being through an integrated approach

A post by Sheila Pontis

The pace of global change has only grown in recent years, spiraling uncertainty about the present and future. Discouraging news reported daily increases feelings of anxiety, making people feel lonelier and unhappier. We struggle to be optimistic and imagine positive futures or paths forward different from what we know (Mulgan, 2020). In this context, both emotional well-being and imagination are strongly connected, suggesting a symbiotic relationship in which both constructs are critical for challenging dominant social views and surfacing unconventional, positive alternatives. An integrated approach can lead to stronger emotional well-being habits that can help individuals and society harness the potential of imagination to make change in their lives and the outside world.

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Imaginative Jailbreak and Phenomenal Overflow

A post by Edvard Aviles-Meza

Have a look at Raphael’s School of Athens (figure 1 below). During a quick glance, do you see each of the individuals depicted? Surely, you wouldn’t recognize them at one glance. Moreover, you probably wouldn’t recall everything you saw. Hence, you also wouldn’t be able to tell. But my question isn’t about recognition, memory, or report; it’s more specific: do you visually experience each individual in the depicted scene during a quick glance? Many psychologists and neuroscientists would say that you don’t because visual experience, or broadly, consciousness is constrained by attention, and you can’t attend to each of them at once (Kouider et al., 2010; Cohen & Dennett, 2011). Moreover, people not only miss local details, but they also fail to notice global features such as the fact that the shape of the visual scene isn’t a rectangle since it occurs only within a lunette, and outside that frame, the appearance of depiction is an illusion. Similarly, rich conscious experience outside attention is an illusion.

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Imaginative Choices in Empathy

A post by Sarah Vernallis

Empathy is an imaginative activity. When we succeed in empathizing, we come to understand what it is like for another person. But what role, exactly, does the imagination play in empathizing? Is there just one imaginative move made in empathizing or do we invoke a varied set of imaginative strategies? On the standard story, the role of imagination in empathy is restricted to reconstructing the other’s situation, leaving the work of getting an affective response to one’s psychological dispositions. We have Adam Smith to thank for this conception:

By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments in his situation, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike him. (Smith, (1982[1759]: I.I.i.2)

On this Smithian traditional story, imagination is at play in recreating the situation of the other person, which then triggers an affective response in the empathizer. This story has been taken up by many contemporary philosophers of empathy, from Goldman (2006) to Currie and Ravenscroft (2002). It seems to me that the roles of imagination in empathy are more varied than this standard story permits, given the diverse strategies we use in empathizing with others. Here, I explore just one such strategy, which is the inverse of this traditional account: affective selection.

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Imagine Learning Through Play

A post by Lucia Oliveri

Imagine a world destroyed by a thirty-year-long war, the most devastating war that seventeenth-century Europe had ever seen. Imagine standing in front of a destroyed land, like Germany. You would likely want to understand how such an evil could have happened and educate people in order to prevent it from ever happening again.

From this perspective, some early modern thinkers, such as G.W. Leibniz (1646–1716), viewed philosophy as a way to improve education, and, consequently, individual and social well-being. They imagined a school where students would learn through play. “One can teach also serious matters through play. And in this context, teaching is more effective,” writes Leibniz in order to challenge those who think that play is just frivolous entertainment (Aufzeichnungen nach einer Lektüre von »ZUFÄLLIGEN GEDANCKEN« [ca. 1691.] A IV 4 608). Quite the contrary: play is a reason-oriented, pleasant, imaginative activity because the mind is at ease with itself. In the free joy of play, human beings develop their theoretical and social skills, their rationality and moral attitudes, and they acquire the status of being responsible citizens. And they do so much better than by being subjected to the hard and long memorization of abstract notions.

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Touching Invisible Walls

A post by Niklas Maranca

Insight into the structure and approach of a practice-based PhD project on imagination

This text traces a path from practice to research. It opens with three short scenes from my own artistic work—pantomime, still life drawing, and scenic painting. Each captures a concrete moment of making, observed through first-person inquiry.

These scenes serve as a starting point: they give rise to questions about the trainability of imagination and its role as a skill. The second part presents imagination games—practical, experimental formats developed to investigate such questions. The closing section situates this method within the broader frame of my doctoral research and offers a glimpse of a first prototype of the approach.

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The University in Crisis: A Review of Undisciplined: Reclaiming the Right to Imagine

A post by Seth Goldwasser

I never had the pleasure of meeting or speaking with Dr. Melz Owusu before his passing, which occurred after I had cited interest in reviewing his book. I’m deeply saddened at his loss; the world has lost an exceptional thinker and preeminent Undisciplined Scholar. So, I’d like to dedicate a moment to Melz’s memory with a breathing exercise to which he invites the reader midway through the book (2025: 56):

Pause, and breathe.

Breathe deeply through your nose until your body is filled with gentle air, hold on to it for a few moments.

Release it through your mouth.

Repeat this a few times.

If you knew Melz, take this moment to honor his memory. If you didn’t, take it to center your thoughts on your breath and on the liberatory action of marginalized scholars and activists that you do know. 

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