Following Gadamer, Dilthey’s philosophy of the social world is beset by an implicit subjectivism which puts into question the very possibility of shared understanding. This subjectivism is taken to lie behind Dilthey’s emphasis on empathy (or “re-experiencing”), which becomes a condition of our understanding of others and knowledge of the socio-historical world generally. I argue that Dilthey does not give primacy to subjectivity, particularly in his later works. Dilthey’s own notion of sociality, accounted for in terms of the common realm (...) of “objective spirit,” is akin to Gadamer’s own anti-subjectivist account of the human sciences and understanding. Through objective spirit, Dilthey shows that understanding cannot be conceived in terms of an aggregation of individual mental acts but is instead an irreducibly social accomplishment. (shrink)

I argue that imagination has an inherently paradoxical structure: it enables one to flee one’s socio-cultural reality and to constitute one’s socio-cultural world. I maintain that most philosophical accounts of the imagination leave this paradox unexplored. I further contend that Paul Ricoeur is the only thinker to have addressed this paradox explicitly. According to Ricoeur, to resolve this paradox, one needs to recognize language as the origin of productive imagination. This paper explores Ricoeur’s solution by offering a detailed study of (...) reproductive and productive imagination in the framework of poetic imagination. My analysis subjects Ricoeur’s distinction between reproductive and productive imagination to a critique that relies upon the principles of classical phenomenology. According to my central thesis, the imaginative powers of language are themselves rooted in perception. This thesis broadens the scope and significance of Ricoeur’s solution by enabling one to resolve the paradox of imagination not only at the level of language-based imagination, but also at the level of dreams and daydreaming as well as at the level of non-language based art. No less significantly, this thesis enables one to open a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics. (shrink)

This paper adopts the view promoted by early modern philosopher Adam Smith that exercises of the sympathetic imagination play an important role in supporting human sociability and ethical behaviour. It argues that such exercises have potential to significantly change the way in which privileged racial identities relate to marginalised and devalued racial identities. First, the paper draws on Sally Haslanger’s reflections upon her lived experience of transracial parenting to illustrate how sympathetic identification with the experiences of a differently racialized individual (...) can transform the way in which we relate to entire racial groups. Haslanger’s account demonstrates the potential for exercises of the sympathetic imagination to disrupt the way in which we experience our own embodiment, and to generate a form of knowledge that implicates our sense of self and will to act. Second, the paper discusses some limitations of appealing to sympathy as a social resource in less intimate contexts. This discussio... (shrink)

The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.

This paper attempts to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the imagination and its relationship to literature, one which casts it as essentially concerned with fiction-making and the other with culture-making. The literary imagination’s power to create fictions is what gives it its most obvious claim to “autonomy”, as Kant would have it: its freedom to venture out in often wild and spectacular excess of reality. The argument of this paper is that we can locate the literary imagination’s (...) complementary power of cultural articulation in this fictional activity. The suggestion is that we should conceive of the literary imagination as expressing its interests in culture not mimetically but by producing a certain kind of meaning. This meaning is irreducibly narratological, and understanding it helps us to see the role of narrative in bringing into harmony the literary imagination’s interests in both the imaginary and the real. (shrink)