Online research in philosophy

A leading scholar in the psychology of thinking and reasoning argues that the counterfactual imagination—the creation of "if only" alternatives to ...

This article argues for two related theses. First, it defends a general thesis: any kind of necessity, including metaphysical necessity, can only be known a priori. Second, however, it also argues that the sort of a priori involved in modal metaphysical knowledge is not related to imagination or any sort of so-called epistemic possibility. Imagination is neither a proof of possibility nor a limit to necessity. Rather, modal metaphysical knowledge is built on intuition of philosophical categories and the structures they form.

Discusses the different ways in which the concept of imagination has been construed, and provides fascinating glimpses of the role of imagination in the creation and management of Modernity.

Despite Kierkegaard's continual awareness of the dangers of the imagination, he nevertheless redeems the imagination by placing it at the heart of the ethical and religious life. The aim of this paper is to focus on the shape of these positive ways of "being imaginative" in the ethical sphere--aspects which in large part continue in the higher religious stages. Judge William's somewhat obscure discussion of the "actual self" and "ideal self" in "Either/Or", Vol. II, is the clue to how a person's imaginative capacities are harnessed in subjectivity. To illuminate this, the paper examines the imagination's relation to choice, the manner in which the imagination opens the "inner infinity" of the ethical, the imagination's relation to kinesis, and its complex character as the expression for both possibility and the concrete in personality as unified in a dynamic ethical repetition which gives transparency and continuity to the self. Given these new roles for the imagination, Kierkegaard is able to transcend both Romantic and Idealist notions of the "individual," and importantly modifies Hegel's concept of the self, which outwardly appears so similar to Kierkegaard's. In effect, Kierkegaard redeems the imagination by the ethical, and redeems the ethical by means of the imagination. The imagination emerges as a complex and rich ethical concept, for the imagination is a medium of possibility, an activity of idealizing, a passion which contributes to resolution, an organ for the concrete, and a disposition. The paper concludes with a brief sketch of how, in Kierkegaard's understanding, the religious and especially Christian forms of existence continue, yet crucially alter, this imagination of repetition.

This volume brings together specially written essays by leading researchers on the propositional imagination. This is the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that Holmes has a bad habit or that there are zombies. It plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. The Architecture of the Imagination capitalizes on recent attempts to give a cognitive account of this capacity, extending the theoretical picture and exploring the philosophical implications.

Both imagery and imagination play an important part in our mental lives. This article, which has three main sections, discusses both of these phenomena, and the connection between them. The first part discusses mental images and, in particular, the dispute about their representational nature that has become known as the _imagery debate_ . The second part turns to the faculty of the imagination, discussing the long philosophical tradition linking mental imagery and the imagination—a tradition that came under attack in the early part of the twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism. Finally, the third part of this article examines modal epistemology, where the imagination has been thought to serve an important philosophical function, namely, as a guide to possibility.