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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreA post by Mark Windsor and Jakub Stejskal
Many of us are inexorably drawn to material remains of humanity’s deep past: we like to read about new archaeological finds and observe them up close in situ or in museums. What is it about them (and us) that enchants us so? One obvious answer is that they offer us a glimpse into past ways of life: they afford a felt connection with people and events remote in time; they put us, as Carolyn Korsmeyer has described in a recent book, ‘in touch with the past’ (Korsmeyer 2019; see also Windsor 2025).
But while this must be part of the story, it doesn’t account for the phenomenology of the experience of many archaeological objects that we are interested in here. An important part of the experience of many such objects is precisely that the past they promise to put us in touch with lies out of reach.
Read MoreA post by Eric Peterson
Free speech is either a civil liberty essential for a flourishing liberal democracy or a threat to that very democracy, depending on who you ask. There are many arguments that can be proffered from political philosophy and ethics both for the value and the disvalue of free speech. In this post, I take a different route. I intend to argue that free speech has a unique value for our imagination. To the extent that we value imagination, then we should also value free speech. However, the value of free speech is not absolute. There ought to be limits on free speech. Thus, I also intend to argue that imagination has unique value for free speech. In a slogan: free speech matters for what we can imagine, but imagination matters for what we ought to say.
Read MoreA post by Felipe Morales Carbonell
Note: This is a side-piece to a longer essay I am working on, which focuses on how imagination can help us learn how to do things or how to act. The topic here is something I only minimally touch in the longer piece, and which I think is an important limitation of that work, so my goal here is to give some hints at a way to address it. In any case, the first section here summarizes the longer piece.
Imagining how
Let us consider a variation of Williamson’s (2016) illustration of the epistemic use of imagination, the case of a person who wants to cross a stream in the woods. There is some risk, so they have to decide what to do beforehand. In this case, they use their imagination. They imagine that if they run and jump over the stream, they could cross with certain risk; if they don’t propel themselves hard enough, they might fall to the water or hit the rocks. As they see some rocks in the stream bed, they imagine themselves jumping over them. While this could also work, it has the risk of slipping. Then, they imagine that if they used a stick for support, they could minimize the risk. At that point, they come up with a plan to cross the stream: first, they need to get a stick, and then they need to cross the stream jumping from rock to rock. We can say that they have imagined how to cross the stream.
Read MoreA post by Brendan Bo O’Connor
Our future is not a foregone conclusion. It’s actively constructed at the horizon of the present. In a moment when the world feels divisive and isolating, I’d like to share some recent research from my lab that highlights the power of imagining a future together, what we are calling collaborative imagination or co-imagination.
This research advances a framework for studying imagination as a socially creative act, an interactive, interpersonal process in which two or more people dynamically converse to co-create shared representations of hypothetical events, creating new connections and new possibilities of what could be.
From aging lovers to people on a first date, from best friends to new acquaintances, collaborating to imagine shared experiences appears fundamental to human relationships. These imaginings can be as whimsical as make-believe, as mundane as what’s for dinner, or as consequential as the future of our politics and planet.
How might co-imagination transform and strengthen our relationships in the present? Is co-imagining a shared future the first step toward creating one?
Read MoreA post by Tom Schoonen
It's been almost ten years since a great burst of logics of imagination appeared (depending on when you start counting, of course). The idea behind these formalisations is that, although “imagination will take you anywhere,” it will not take you anywhere. That is, there is some method to the madness and the aim is to capture this in a logical framework. (Note that most logics of imagination focus mainly on reality-oriented imagination, I will follow suit here.) Theorists working on the logic of imagination try to strike a balance: we can imagine things we believe, or know, to be false (“imagination will take you anywhere”), though in most instances of imagination it does not seem to be the case that anything goes (“well…, not anywhere”). In this post, I want to highlight a worry for a branch of the most popular logics of imagination, based on joint work with Aybüke Özgün and Tianyi Chu.
Read MoreA post by Cassandra Vieten
As a psychologist and researcher, my career has focused on how people change. In particular, I have investigated the experiences, practices, and environments that transform people’s worldviews—their stories about themselves and the world—and as a result, change their thinking patterns, behavior, biology and brain. Over a couple of decades of research, I am convinced that extraordinary experiences can change us in profound and lasting ways. Just like an experience of trauma can change us in lasting ways, a profoundly positive experience can change us in positive ways: kind of like post-traumatic stress in reverse.
But here’s the surprising part: those experiences don’t always have to be real. More accurately, those experiences don’t have to be externally or physically real: they can happen in our imagination. Practicing imagination holds the potential to transform our lives into something extraordinary. Even negative imagination, when we don’t get stuck there, can be helpful in our personal growth journey.
Read MoreA post by Nick Wiltsher
Here are three related claims to which I’m increasingly sympathetic:
(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.
Claim (3) only matters if claims (1) and (2) stand up. So let’s see if they do.
Read MoreA post by Caterina Moruzzi
Imagine the near future of 2030 where AI has become deeply embedded in creative workflows. What does that future look like?
This is one of the questions that we are asking the participants in the “Future Proofing Creative Skills for Responsible AI Adoption” workshop series (https://crea-tec.weebly.com/workshops.html). Through these workshops we aim to identify and discuss the new and future-proof skills that creators need in the current technological landscape.
This post is about the significance of imagining the future of our creative interactions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in order to proactively anticipate the transformative impact of these emerging technologies on creative education and professional practice. I will talk about how the workshop series was designed to account for this significance, and present some preliminary insights from the initial sessions.
Read MoreA post by Heidi L. Maibom and Kyle Furlane
In his essay Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes the following encounter with a fascist: “a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” (Orwell 2021)
In this passage, Orwell describes a Gestalt switch taking place as a result of a seemingly insignificant detail, namely an enemy soldier being half-dressed and holding up his pants. This brings his humanity into view. We want to suggest that this “view” is not entirely metaphorical. Orwell experiences the person as a fellow human being instead of as a fascist.
Read MoreA post by Shannon Spaulding
Can you have trust without understanding? This is not an esoteric question. It is a question directly relevant for the many politically and affectively polarized debates in our society. Individuals on either side of these polarized debates find it difficult to empathically imagine the perspective of someone on the other side, and to see what is subjectively reasonable about the other’s perspective. Moreover, individuals on either side of these polarized debates tend to distrust those on the other side. Such polarization raises the question whether there is a rational way out of this dynamic.
Read MoreA post by Radu Bumbăcea
The perfect mind-reader. When you go to the office in the morning, your colleague is already there: after saying hello, she scans you for a few seconds, tracks your eye and then says ‘oh, so you are still musing about the cactus that we got rid of three weeks ago.’ This colleague of yours is a perfect mind-reader: she picks up on all the possible cues, puts them together almost instantaneously, and is able to realise what you feel, no matter how discrete you are trying to be.
The prospect of such a colleague might make one eager to work from home. But why? What could have gone wrong with the practice of understanding others, usually much praised?
Read MoreA post by Catherine Wearing
Recent gains in the capabilities of generative AI systems pose a dilemma for our thinking about creativity. On the one hand, some of the products of these systems seem pretty creative. Some of the images generated by Midjourney and stories generated by ChatGPT are good enough that, had they been produced by humans, they would count as creative. Similarly, systems like AlphaFold (which predicts the 3D structures of proteins) and AlphaGo (which plays the boardgame Go to a level of proficiency sufficient to beat human grandmasters) produce results which have some claim to count as creative. On the other hand, most people are reluctant to grant that these AI systems themselves are creative.
One tempting reaction to this clash of intuitions is to divorce the criteria for a creative product from those for a creative producer. If there’s a way to acknowledge the creativity of a product while denying creativity to its producer, then we can respect both of the intuitions which generative AI systems provoke. This is the strategy I want to explore here.
Read MoreA post by Steve Humbert-Droz
In this blog, the game consists of making as many connections between any topics and imagination as possible. Sometimes, like today, these connections seem almost scandalous: what could be further from imagination than intelligence? They even appear antithetical: meticulous scientists can lack mental images (Galton, 1880); conversely, Art Brut artists create highly imaginative works despite cognitive impairments. This prejudice dates back at least to Hume (1738: 118), who defines (one sense of) imagination as the opposite of reason.
Of course, some precise senses of imagination are more compatible with intelligence — think of Kant’s synthesizing faculty. But in a broader sense, imagination and intelligence share striking similarities: both apply across various tasks (domain-general), come in degrees, are unequally distributed across the population, and are partially normative (it is better to have a lot of them).
Perhaps due to these similarities, some types of imagination seem to play a central role in intelligence. Moreover, debates over their definition and scope mirror each other. This post explores these two connections between imagination and intelligence, with the aim that philosophical investigation into both fields may benefit from each other.
Read MoreA post by Katia Franco
Trust is a fragile thing, especially when it comes to trust in ourselves. Knowing as much as we do about ourselves, having to evaluate the constantly incoming evidence about our own trustworthiness, self-trust is a difficult task to manage. More to the point, trust in ourselves is particularly fragile because it hinges on a delicate issue at the intersection of ethics and psychology: self-deception.
Unlike with interpersonal deception, when one person intentionally misleads another, there is no agreement as to whether self-deception is an intentional act. In fact, the currently dominant view is that self-deception is an understandable and unintentional psychological response to a difficult situation (Bach 1997, Barnes 1997, Johnston 1988, Mele 2001). Under intense psychological pressure, such as anxiety or a strong desire for something to be the case, it makes sense that we might (unintentionally) come to believe something that does not align with the evidence – a sort of self-preservation response. For example, one might be often irritated by someone, and under the psychological pressure to view themselves as a good person, they might misidentify the source of their irritation to be that other person’s bad behavior, rather than the fact that such behavior reminds them of their own bad behavior.
Read MoreA post by Zuzanna Rucińska
Gaslighting is a form of emotional manipulation in which “the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone a sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds – paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy” (Abramson, 2014, p. 2). Can you do that to yourself? I propose you can, and that imagination is involved in the process too.
Read MoreA post by Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s (1648-1695) Primero Sueño (First Dream) is an astonishing epistemological poem that follows the flight of an intellectual soul, freed from its body by the sleep of reason, as it seeks to understand all of creation. Of the many subjects worthy of philosophical interest in the epic poem, my focus will be the way its incredible imagery hints at a psychological ontology. Quotations of Sor Juana’s [SJ] Spanish-language verse in the following are my own English glosses.
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