Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? (...) Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? (...) Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

In this paper, I oppose the common assumption that visual descriptions in prose fiction are imageable by virtue of perceptual mimesis. Based on introspection as well as convergent support from cognitive science and other disciplines, I argue that visual description (and the mental imagery it elicits), unlike narrative (and the mental imagery it elicits), often stands in no positive relation to perceptual mimesis because it lacks a structural counterpart in perceptual experience. I present an alternative way of defining (...) the kind of mental imagery elicited by visual descriptions, and propose a number of text variables underlying the imageability or non-imageability of any such description. (shrink)

When we see an object, we also represent those parts of it that are not visible. The question is how we represent them: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider three possible accounts: (a) we see them, (b) we have non-perceptual beliefs about them and (c) we have immediate perceptual access to them, and point out that all of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I suggest and defend a fourth account, according to which we (...) represent the occluded parts of perceived objects by means of mental imagery. This conclusion could be thought of as a (weak) version of the Strawsonian dictum, according to which “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”. (shrink)

The paper examines the relationships between the contents of imaginative episodes and the mental images that often play a central role within them. It considers, for example, whether the presence of mental imagery is required for a mental episode to count as an imagining.

The problem of amodal perception is the problem of how we represent features of perceived objects that are occluded or otherwise hidden from us. Bence Nanay (2010) has recently proposed that we amodally perceive an object's occluded features by imaginatively projecting them into the relevant regions of visual egocentric space. In this paper, I argue that amodal perception is not a single, unitary capacity. Drawing appropriate distinctions reveals amodal perception to be characterized not only by mental imagery, as Nanay (...) suggests, but also by genuinely visual representations as well as beliefs. I conclude with some brief remarks on the role of object-directed bodily action in conferring a sense of unseen presence on an object's occluded features. (shrink)

Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding _Handbook_ contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects (...) of the philosophy of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and ‘imaginative resistance’ Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy _of Imagination_ is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional (...) and anatomical dissociations between mental imagery and perception. Assuming that the mental imagery and perception do not overlap, at least, to the extent traditionally assumed, then the question arises as to what exactly mental imagery is and whether it parallels perception by proceeding via several functionally distinct mechanisms. In this review, we argue that even though there may not be a shared mechanism underlying vision for perception and conscious imagery, there is an overlap between the mechanisms underlying vision for action and unconscious visual imagery. On the basis of these findings, we propose a modification of Kosslyn’s model of imagery that accommodates unconscious imagination and explore possible explanations of the quasi-pictorial phenomenology of conscious visual imagery in light of the fact that its underlying neural substrates and mechanisms typically are distinct from those of visual experience. (shrink)

Mental imagery has often been taken to be equivalent to “sensory imagination”, the perception‐like type of imagination at play when, for example, one visually imagines a flower when none is there, or auditorily imagines a music passage while wearing earplugs. I contend that the equation of mental imagery with sensory imagination stems from a confusion between two senses of mental imagery. In the first sense, mental imagery is used to refer to a psychological (...) attitude, which is perception‐like in nature. In the second sense, mental imagery refers to a mental content, which can be grasped via different attitudes. I will show that failure to acknowledge the distinction between these senses of mental imagery has muddled philosophical discussion. This distinction brings much needed clarity to debates where sensory imagination and mental imagery are invoked, shedding light on issues such as the nature of imagistic mental states, and the representational powers and limits of mental imagery. I will conclude by sketching a general attitudinal account of imagination that does justice to both senses of mental imagery, outlining a promising framework for understanding imagination. (shrink)

Aesthetic properties figure prominently in our daily lives, our conversations and many actions we take. Yet theoretical disagreement prevails over their nature, their variety, their epistemic and metaphysical status. This overview highlights the heterogeneity of aesthetic properties and examines repercussions for explanation. Aesthetic properties belong to natural objects or scenes, to artworks in any medium, to artefacts and built environments across historical eras; and they draw a wide variety of responses such as our perceptions, emotions or imaginative (...) thought. Historicism about artworks carries over to at least some aesthetic properties that depend on facts of their broader historical context just as works do. One issue is whether aesthetic properties can be demarcated solely in terms of non-aesthetic properties. If not, explanations of aesthetic properties need to draw on other aesthetic notions such as aesthetic experience, attention, judgement or value. The paper examines several accounts of aesthetic value to show how they extend to aesthetic properties. The paper concludes with an overview of the current metaphysical debate between realists and non-realists about aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Defined as vicarious sensorimotor experiencing, mental imagery is a powerful source of aesthetic enjoyment in everyday life and, reportedly, one of the commonest things readers remember about literary narratives in the long term. Furthermore, it is positively correlated with other dimensions of reader response, most notably with emotion. Until recent decades, however, the phenomenon of mental imagery has been largely overlooked by modern literary scholarship. As an attempt to strengthen the status of mental imagery within the (...) literary and, more generally, aesthetic discipline, this dissertation proposes an analysis positioned at a confluence of literary theory and the cognitive sciences, especially the emergent research framework of embodied cognition. Questions asked throughout the dissertation include the following: a) What are the basic varieties of mental imagery in the reading of literary narrative? b) By what contents or narrative strategies are they most likely to be prompted? c) What is it like to experience a mental image of a particular variety? d) What are its psychophysiological underpinnings? e) How does a mental image of a particular variety relate to perception? f) How does it relate to higher-order meaning-making? Four prototypical imagery varieties are distinguished on the basis of two variables with two values each (referential vs. verbal domain; inner vs. outer stance). Gradual transitions and in-between imagery varieties are acknowledged. The imagery typology and related hypotheses are grounded in introspection but carefully supported with indirect empirical evidence and, whenever possible, formulated so as to facilitate direct validation. (shrink)

We explore the understanding of conscious states in terms of spatio-temporal dynamics through modelling a mobile agent. Conscious states are associated with an agent's spontaneous and deterministic fluctuation between attachment to and detachment from the surroundings. It is because of this fluctuating nature, we argue, that an agent can perceive structure in the world. Perception requires a conscious state in physical devices. This is a central concern of this paper, and we examine it by simulating a mobile agent equipped with (...) an interconnected Fitz-Hugh-Nagumo (FHN) neuron network with delayed signal transmissions. The agent can move around a space by sensing the environment pattern through the input neurons and computing the motor outputs via the FHN network. The agent shows a variety of motion styles and a spontaneous selection of motion styles responding to the surroundings. Such a phenomenon is named embodied chaotic itinerancy (ECI), as an extension of chaotic itinerant dynamics, which is known to be a typical dynamic with a high degree of freedom. We take this selective mode of response to be significant, particularly those interacting with spatial pattern, as an inevitable property of conscious states. (shrink)

Mental imagery is perceptual processing that is not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. Temporal mental imagery is perceptual processing that is not triggered by temporally corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. We aim to show that temporal mental imagery plays an important role in explaining a number of diverse mental phenomena, from the thickness of temporal experience and the specious present to episodic memory and postdictive perception.

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented (...) with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi‐pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the “traditional” symbolic computational view of mental contents, (...) but is compatible with recentsituated cognition and active visionapproaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non‐discursiveness, creativity, and seeing as) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non‐discursive and relates it closely to seeing as. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought. (shrink)

Imaginings are often characterized in terms of vividness. However, there is little agreement in the philosophical literature as to what it amounts to and how to even investigate it. In this paper, we propose a natural kind methodology to study vividness and suggest treating it as a homeostatic property cluster with an underlying nature that explains the correlation of properties in that cluster. This approach relies on the empirical research on the vividness of mental imagery and contrasts with those (...) accounts that treat vividness as an explanatory primitive and with those that attempt to provide a definition. We apply the natural kind methodology to make several substantive claims about the vividness of mental imagery. First, we will argue that it forms a homeostatic property cluster, in that it is reliably correlated with, but not defined by, some properties, such as the level of detail, clarity, perception-likeness and intensity. In arguing for this claim, we also show how the cluster can be modified in the light of empirical research by complementing it with a correlation between vividness and familiarity. Second, we will argue that these correlations can be explained by an underlying property at the architectural level; i.e., the availability of stored sensory information for the elaboration of a mental image. (shrink)

Is mental imagery pictorial? In Pylyshyn's view no empirical data provides convincing support to the “pictorial” hypothesis of mental imagery. Phenomenology, Pylyshyn says, is deeply deceiving and offers no explanation of why and how mental imagery occurs. We suggest that Pylyshyn mistakes phenomenology for what it never pretended to be. Phenomenological evidence, if properly considered, shows that mental imagery may indeed be pictorial, though not in the way that mimics visual perception. Moreover, Pylyshyn claims that the (...) “pictorial hypothesis” is flawed because the interpretation of “picture-like” objects in mental imagery takes a homunculus. However, the same point can be objected to Pylyshyn's own conclusion: if imagistic reasoning involves the same mechanisms and the same forms of representation as those that are involved in general reasoning, if they operate on symbol-based representations of the kind recommended by Pylyshyn (1984) and Fodor (1975), don't we need a phenomenological homunculus to tell an imagined bear from the real one? (shrink)

We argue that pre-cueing studies show that perception is cognitively penetrated via mental imagery. It is important to be clear about the relation between attention and mental imagery here. We do not want to question the role of attention in pre-cueing studies. After all, it is attention that is being pre-cued. The pre-cue draws attention to certain features, which via top-down connections induces mental imagery for the pre-cued properties, which, then, after stimulus-presentation, interacts with and influences the (...) online computations that process stimulus features. That is, what mediates the cognitive penetration of perceptual processing is not pre-cued attention, but cue-induced mental imagery. (shrink)

This paper sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery and uses it to criticize representationalism and the internalist-versus-externalist framework for understanding consciousness. Contrary to internalist views of mental imagery imagery experience is not the experience of a phenomenal mental picture inspected by the mind’s eye, but rather the mental simulation of perceptual experience. Furthermore, there are experiential differences in perceiving and imagining that are not differences in the properties represented by these experiences. Therefore, externalist representationalism, (...) which maintains that the properties of experience are the external properties represented by experience, is an inadequate account of conscious experience. (shrink)

This contribution proposes how beholders may internally process unfinished works of art. It does so by considering five of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s interrupted sculptures and pointing out their empathic and imaginative potential. The beholder focused on the surface, I propose, is inclined to mentally simulate the artist’s gesture that drafted the sculptures through the visible graphic signs of the chisels. This inner simulation takes place within the activation of various brain networks, located in the brain’s motor system. Renaissance authors associated the (...) observation of the unfinished to learning and, as this article shows, this assumption seems to find confirmation in recent neuroscientific studies on mirror neurons and imitation learning. In this way, the empathic engagement established between the beholder and the work of art observed – as well as the role played by embodied simulation and imagination in this kind of visual perception – clarifies how the incompleteness can also have that pedagogical function recognised by Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini. (shrink)

Since the publication of my "Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An _Active Perception_ Approach to Conscious Mental Content,", a good deal of published material has appeared or has come to my attention that either provides additional support for the Perceptual Activity Theory PA theory) of mental imagery presented in ATOITOI, or that throws further doubt on the rival theories that are criticized there. Other relevant evidence was not mentioned in ATOITOI because I lacked the space (...) for a proper explanation of its relevance. I hope eventually to write and publish a new account of " PA " theory, that will make use of much of this material. In the meantime this page provides citations to the "new" support, and discussion sections that briefly explain the relevance of the cited material. Quite apart from presenting new lines of supporting evidence and argument, I hope this page will help to clarify many aspects of. (shrink)

This commentary argues that the “illusion” to which Wegner refers in The Illusion of Conscious Will is actually the illusion that our conscious experience of mentally causing certain behaviors explains the behavior in question: It is not the subjective experience itself that is illusory, but the implied causal explanation. The experience of “mental effort” is cited as another example of this sort of illusion. Another significant example is the experience that properties of the representation of our mental images (...) are responsible for certain patterns of behavior observed in mental imagery experiments. Examples include the increase in reaction time found when details are reported from smaller images or when attention is switched between different places and features (imagined as further apart than they are) within a single image. These examples illustrate the nature of the “illusion” involved: It is the illusion that certain observed regularities occur because of the content of the experience, as opposed to the converse – that experience has the content it does because of what the person figures out would happen in the imagined situation. (shrink)

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and (...) Sartre) he draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)

Look at a red apple. Now close your eyes and visualize this apple. Your perceptual state and your imagery of the apple are very similar in some respects. They are also different in some respects. The aim of this paper is to address three questions about the relation between perception and imagination: -/- (a) How similar are perception and imagination and what explains this similarity? (b) How different are perception and imagination and what explains this difference? (c) (...) How do perception and imagination interact? (shrink)

Traditionally ‘imagination’ primarily denotes the faculty of mental imagery, other usages being derivative. However, contemporary philosophers commonly hold it to be a polysemous term, with several unrelated senses. This effectively eliminates this culturally important concept as an appropriate explanandum for science, and paves the way for a thoroughgoing eliminative materialism. White challenges both these views of imagination, arguing that ‘imagine’ never means ‘suppose,’ ‘believe,’ ‘pretend’ or ‘visualize,’ that imagery may occur without imagination, and that the true (...) sense of ‘imagine’ is ‘think of as possibly being so.’ I defend a version of the traditional view. The disseverance of imagination from imagery is motivated by an implicit version of the theory of mental images as pictures. Other contemporary scientific theories of imagery do not entail it. I defend a view of imagery as arising from the interpretative aspect of perception and connect this, and our contemporary concept of imagination, to the root Aristotelian concept of φαντασία.This captures the association between imagination and creativity, and reveals the coherence of the concept, more plausibly than White’s theory. (shrink)

Traditionally ‘imagination’ primarily denotes the faculty of mental imagery, other usages being derivative. However, contemporary philosophers commonly hold it to be a polysemous term, with several unrelated senses. This effectively eliminates this culturally important concept as an appropriate explanandum for science, and paves the way for a thoroughgoing eliminative materialism. White challenges both these views of imagination, arguing that ‘imagine’ never means ‘suppose,’ ‘believe,’ ‘pretend’ or ‘visualize,’ that imagery may occur without imagination, and that the true (...) sense of ‘imagine’ is (roughly) ‘think of as possibly being so.’ I defend a version of the traditional view. The disseverance of imagination from imagery is motivated by an implicit version of the theory of mental images as pictures. Other contemporary scientific theories of imagery do not entail it. I defend a view of imagery as arising from the interpretative aspect of perception (‘seeing-as’) and connect this, and our contemporary concept of imagination, to the root Aristotelian concept of φαντασία.This captures the association between imagination and creativity, and reveals the coherence of the concept, more plausibly than White’s theory. (shrink)

Mental Imagery, whereby we experience aspect of a perceptual scene or perceptual object in the absence of direct sensory stimulation is ubiquitous. Often the existence of mental imagery is demonstrated by asking one’s reader to volitionally generate a visual object, such as closing ones eyes and imagining an apple. However, mental imagery also arises in auditory, tactile, interoceptive, and olfactory cases. A number of influential philosophical theories have attempted to explain mental imagery in terms of belief-based (...) forms of representation using the Dependence Thesis, dependence upon means of access, such as enactivism, or in terms of the similarity of content with perceptual processing. The focus of this paper concerns the later approach and in particular assessing if Nanay’s promissory note that his theory is applicable to modalities other than vision, such as smell, seems likely to be of theoretical tender. The thesis argued for in this paper is that olfactory imagery exists and is best accounted for by considering it as a type of perceptual processing with a unique representational format relative to the olfactory perceptual modality. The paper concludes by summarizing the applicability of Nanay’s theory of mental imagery for olfaction and suggests some further issues that arise when transitioning to multi-modal mental imagery. (shrink)

It is often observed that images—including mental images—are in some sense representationally ambiguous. Some, including Jerry Fodor, have added that mental images only come to have determinate contents through the contribution of non-imagistic representations that accompany them. This paper agrees that a kind of ambiguity holds with respect to mental imagery, while arguing (pace Fodor) that this does not prevent imagery from having determinate contents in the absence of other, non-imagistic representations. Specifically, I argue that mental (...) images can represent determinate types of outlays of properties without help from any non-imagistic representations, yet can only become involved in the representation of particular objects through pairing with a non-imagistic representation of the right sort. These points are defended through reflection on the “Picture Principle,” the nature of depiction, and general principles for typing and individuating mental states. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to justify the role of mental imagery in creativity. In more specific terms the central idea of this paper is that the justification for the role of mental images in the creative process lies in the analysis of the relationship between vision and imagery. Mental images are present in thought just in those situations in which the ideal way to solve a problem would be the perception of those same things before (...) our own eyes. The production of a mental image is, from this point of view, an analogous process to the perception of an object in its absence. In these cases the images become a good substitute for reality: this is possible because they share common structural elements with percepts. These shared common characteristics provide a validation to the idea that the role of imagery in creativity depends on the structural properties which mental images share with the representation of the perceived information. Such a result opens the way to the idea that there is a close link between imagery and vision and, thus, provide justification for the theory that imagery is closer to perceiving than to thinking. (shrink)

Here is a crucial question in the contemporary philosophy of perception: how can we be aware of action properties? According to the perceptual view, we consciously see them: they are present in our visual phenomenology. However, this view faces some problems. First, I review these problems. Then, I propose an alternative view, according to which we are aware of action properties because we imagine them through a special form of imagery, which I call visuomotor imagery. My account is to be (...) preferred as it offers an explanation of our awareness of action properties without generating all the problems that the perceptual view faces. (shrink)

How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. This paper labels such a view ‘perceptualism’ about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, cognitive penetration. The paper (...) also defuses a recent, influential argument for perceptualism based on the ‘discovery’ that visual perception and mental imagery share a significant neural substrate: circuitry in V1, the brain’s primary visual cortex. Current neuropsychology is shown to be equivocal at best on this matter. While experiments conducted on healthy, neurotypical subjects indicate substantial neural overlap, there is extensive clinical evidence of dissociations between imagery and perception in the brain, most notably in the case of aphantasia. (shrink)

"Time. Perception. Imagination. Phenomenological Studies on the Question of Time by Augustine, Kant and Husserl". (rus), SPb, 2013. Summary: The monograph is devoted to the key elements of the philosophy of time which determine the necessity of historicism in the analysis of subjectivity. The main idea which defined the composition and design of this work is to trace how the Kantian definition of time as the “form of inner sense” is revealed in Husserl’s phenomenology. The original intention was to (...) understand all three components of this definition. Firstly, what is the inner form, in terms of phenomenology, what are the principles of its constitution and how one can talk about the property of formation? Secondly, what is the meaning of the term "inner" in philosophy, where the division into internal and external has always been a formality, not affecting the essence of things? And finally, what sort of “sensibility” is assumed in transcendental science, bound to become the basis of understanding the history and culture. Presumably, these three Kantian concepts constituted the original plan to analyze the nature of cognitive capabilities of the subject, claiming the gnoseological stage on which the philosophy of time is unfolded. In other words, this work deals with the historical and philosophical analysis of the phenomenological principles by which the concept of time as developed in the twentieth century emerged in the framework of phenomenology. The analyze of the structure of the subject assumes that time, perception and imagination combine in a special type of inner synthesis, which may not be relevant to certain aspects of the method but maintain the basis for a kind of anthropology of time, in continuation of the traditional “inner” contemplation. I consider the inner structure of time with the account of philosophy of St. Augustine, who in many respects not only anticipated the conclusions of phenomenology, but also in his reflections encompassed deeper layers of inner experience. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of St. Augustine, in which the theory of time is analyzed in conjunction with the doctrine of “inner word”, specifics of memory representations and notion of inner sense. Additionally, I consider St. Augustine’s reflections about numbers that constitute the basis of aesthetic perception of music (De Musica). Thus, the philosophy of St. Augustine already covers the whole spectrum of anthropology of time, including the question of relation between time and eternity, which remains practically unexplored in phenomenology and serves as the proof of that in interactions between philosophy and theology the tradition remains important. The second chapter of this study is devoted to analysis of the transcendental aesthetic of Kant, which includes all the methodological possibilities of considering the category of time as a formal condition for any experience, consequentially serving as a foundation for further logical development by Husserl, which includes the critical disengagement of the founder of phenomenology from Kant's transcendentalism. Particular attention is paid to the origin of the concept of inner sense, as well as possible interpretations of the function of imagination, which as a transcendental ability remains the most interesting type of synthesis. Handwritten fragments of Kant’s works are also of interest to the character of the imagery as considered in detail by Husserl. Chapter three discusses the phenomenology of inner time consciousness, represented in those important aspects, without which it is impossible to speak about the internal structure of temporal experience - the subjectivity of time, retention, "living present", and the character of synthesis. Particular attention is paid to Husserl's polemics with those representatives of psychological branch in the studies of consciousness, whose ideas greatly influenced the very motivation for creating the method. Apart from the well-known criticism of Brentano, the third chapter highlights the rarely analyzed psychological ideas that motivated the choice of Husserl’s terminology - the "Präsenzzeit” by W. Stern, the "psychological analysis" by A. Meinong, and the “fusion” (Verschmelzung) by K. Stumpf. Chapter four deals with the need to analyze the specifics of image as an element of consciousness and imagery as such, which includes a system of objectified acts. Thus is revealed the very nature of synthetic connections in the acts of consciousness, as well as the presumably imaginative character of the constitution of temporal form. (shrink)

A number of authors have asked what it takes for a course of mental imagery to be epistemically or practically useful. This paper addresses a prior question, namely, the difference between courses of imagination that are realistic and those that are fantastic. One approach, suggested by recent literature concerning the utility of imagery, holds that a course of imagination represents realistically if and only if the course of events represented conforms to certain accepted constraints. Against this it (...) will be argued that the constraints cannot be both permissive enough and restrictive enough. An alternative approach adds as a necessary condition that realistic courses of imagination are constructed in accordance with certain procedures on the basis of remembered perceptions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer C. Nash Black Lactation Aesthetics: Remaking the Natural in Lakisha Cohill’s Photographs In her 1992 essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks recounts entering a “late night dessert place” with a group of colleagues who all began to laugh at a shelf of “gigantic chocolate breasts complete with nipples— huge edible tits.”1 For hooks, the chocolate Black (...) breasts are mammy imagery, a “displaced longing for a racist past when the bodies of black women were a commodity, available to anyone white who could pay the price.”2 For her white colleagues, the chocolate breasts are simply comical. Her colleagues’ response—their willingness to consume, laugh, and ignore racial, gendered, sexual violence—constitutes the racialized visual marketplace that hooks’s essay seeks to both describe and dismantle. The chocolate breasts become a rhetorical point of entry into hooks’s critical engagement with a visual marketplace where Black female bodies are delectable and disposable objects. hooks’s analysis has become part of a canon of Black feminist work exploring how Black breasts get taken up as signs of pathology, “excess flesh,” sexual deviance, hypersexuality, and alterity.3 From histories of the so-called Hottentot Venus and the preoccupation with her breasts, buttocks, and genitalia—including 1. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 61. 2. hooks, 61–62. 3. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Jennifer C. Nash 95 signature works by Zine Magubane, Janell Hobson, Samantha Pinto, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting4 —to scholarship on the construction of black women’s imagined corporeality as “social dead weight” by Sabrina Strings, Black feminists have given critical attention to the construction of Black breasts as the location of Black women’s imagined racial and sexual difference.5 If Black breasts have been culturally and scientifically constructed as deviant, excessive, pornographic, and desirous, they have largely been uncoupled from an identification with nutrition—from the capacity to sustain and feed babies—except their connection with wet nursing and their conscription into maternal labor for white children. In this imaginary, Black breasts provide nutrition only when recruited as white property, with their nurturance capacity oriented toward white health and futurity. We might understand the cultural inability to interpret Black breasts as nurturing Black life as part of what Andrea Freeman describes as the “unmothering” of Black women, the unseeing of Black maternity except to elevate it as a symbol of brokenness or pathology.6 But in recent years, as I argue in my forthcoming book Birthing Black Mothers, Black breasts have entered the US cultural imagination anew. Black breasts are increasingly viewed as in need of support through seemingly benign state interventions to encourage Black breastfeeding. Indeed, Black breasts are recruited by an array of actors who often find themselves strangely aligned to champion Black breastfeeding —including NGOs, public health campaigns, and reproductive justice efforts spearheaded by Black feminists—precisely because Black breastfeeding is thought to perform urgent political, emotional, and 4. See Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender & Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–834; Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005); Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. See Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 6. Andrea Freeman, “Unmothering Black Women: Formula Feeding as an Incident of Slavery,” Hastings Law Journal 69, no 1545 (2018): 1545–1606. 96 Jennifer C. Nash public health work. Black breastmilk is increasingly described as a crucial technology of Black life, one that supports Black infant life and inoculates it physically, psychically, and even spiritually against the array of anti-Black forces that wound and violate. The work that Black breast milk is thought to perform includes its posited... (shrink)

Predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception are unique not merely in that they postulate a unity between perception and imagination. Rather, they are unique in claiming that perception should be conceptualised in terms of imagination and that the two involve an identity of neural implementation. This paper argues against this postulated unity, on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Conceptually, the manner in which PP theorists link perception and imagination belies an impoverished account of imagery as cloistered from (...) the external world in its intentionality, akin to a virtual reality, as well as endogenously generated. Yet this ignores a whole class of imagery whose intentionality is directed on the actual environment—projected mental imagery—and also ignores the fact that imagery may be triggered crossmodally in a bottom-up, stimulus-driven way. Empirically, claiming that imagery and perception share neural circuitry ignores relevant clinical results in this area. These evidence substantial perception/imagery neural dissociations, most notably in the case of aphantasia. Taken together, the arguments here suggest that PP theorists should substantially temper, if not outright abandon, their claim to a perception/imagination unity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that it is a promising avenue of research to consider philosophy of perception to be a guide to aesthetics. More precisely, my claim is that many, maybe even most, traditional problems in aesthetics are in fact about philosophy of perception that can, as a result, be fruitfully addressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception. This claim may sound provocative, but after qualifying what I mean by aesthetics (to (...) be contrasted with philosophy of art) and by philosophy of perception, it may be easier to accept. (shrink)

When we are invited to imagine an unacceptable moral proposition to be true in fiction, we feel resistance when we try to imagine it. Despite this, it is nonetheless possible to suppose that the proposition is true. In this paper, I argue that existing accounts of imaginative resistance are unable to explain why only attempts to imagine the truth of moral propositions cause resistance. My suggestion is that imagination, unlike supposition, involves mental imagery and imaginative resistance arises when (...) imagery that one has formed does not match unacceptable propositions. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception (...) into account. The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

Recent neural models clarify many properties of mental imagery as part of the process whereby bottom-up visual information is influenced by top-down expectations, and how these expectations control visual attention. Volitional signals can transform modulatory top-down signals into supra-threshold imagery. Visual hallucinations can occur when the normal control of these volitional signals is lost.

When I am looking at my coffee machine that makes funny noises, this is an instance of multisensory perception – I perceive this event by means of both vision and audition. But very often we only receive sensory stimulation from a multisensory event by means of one sense modality, for example, when I hear the noisy coffee machine in the next room, that is, without seeing it. The aim of this paper is to bring together empirical findings about multimodal perception (...) and empirical findings about (visual, auditory, tactile) mental imagery and argue that on occasions like this, we have multimodal mental imagery: perceptual processing in one sense modality (here: vision) that is triggered by sensory stimulation in another sense modality (here: audition). Multimodal mental imagery is not a rare and obscure phenomenon. The vast majority of what we perceive are multisensory events: events that can be perceived in more than one sense modality – like the noisy coffee machine. And most of the time we are only acquainted with these multisensory events via a subset of the sense modalities involved – all the other aspects of these multisensory events are represented by means of multisensory mental imagery. This means that multisensory mental imagery is a crucial element of almost all instances of everyday perception. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui (...) generis mental state or process—one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

Human beings have the ability to ‘augment’ reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visually perceived scene. For example, when deciding how to arrange furniture in a new home, one might project the image of an armchair into an empty corner or the image of a painting onto a wall. The experience of noticing a constellation in the sky at night is also perceptual-imaginative amalgam: it involves both seeing the stars in the constellation and imagining the lines that connect (...) them at the same time. I here refer to such hybrid experiences – involving both a bottom-up, externally generated component and a top-down, internally generated component – as make-perceive (Briscoe 2008, 2011). My discussion in this paper has two parts. In the first part, I show that make-perceive enables human beings to solve certain problems and pursue certain projects more effectively than bottom-up perceiving or top-down visualization alone. To this end, the skillful use of projected mental imagery is surveyed in a variety of contexts, including action planning, the interpretation of static mechanical diagrams, and non-instrumental navigation. In the second part, I address the question of whether make-perceive may help to account for the “phenomenal presence” of occluded or otherwise hidden features of perceived objects. I argue that phenomenal presence is not well explained by the hypothesis that hidden features are represented using projected mental images. In defending this position, I point to important phenomenological and functional differences between the way hidden object features are represented respectively in mental imagery and amodal completion. (shrink)