This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Rob Hopkins’ recent book: The Profile of Imagining (Oxford University Press, 2024). Yesterday we began with an introduction from Rob. Commentaries and replies follow today through Thursday.

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Commentary from Seth Goldwasser

Robert Hopkins’s The Profile of Imagining articulates with great clarity and defends with sprezzatura a new vision of sensory imagining. I love this book. And I find much to like about Hopkins’s profiling account of sensory imagining, as I defend the claim that imagination in general is an agential power, namely, a skill (Goldwasser 2024). I hope to be the Tommy Oliver to Hopkins’s Jason Lee Scott. 

This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s (eds.) recent book: Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. Today we have a commentary from Seth Goldwasser. Additional commentaries will appear the rest of the week.

It’s not uncommon to hear that someone has a good memory or is particularly imaginative. At first glance, such attributions appear to pick out some innate quality or disposition. However, philosophers have begun investigating whether memory and imagination might be cognitive skills or abilities (see Hopkins 2014, 2018, 2022, n.d., especially chapters 1 and 4-6; Kind 2020, 2022a,b,c; Michaelian 2021; and my 2022). In that case, to have a good memory or be imaginative might mean being a skilled rememberer or imaginer. Or it might mean that one is able to accurately recall some detail or vividly picture some far-off, alien possibility (more or less) at will.