Welcome to a small workshop on Imagination & Creativity.
All interested are welcome to attend all, or parts of, the workshop. No registration needed, but if you wish to attend the dinner please contact Dimitri Coelho Mollo well in advance (contact link below).
The workshop is also incorporating the Research seminar series in Philosophy talk the same day, see the seminar event page here.
Workshop programme:
10:15-11:00 - Pär Sundström (Umeå): Phenomenal Knowledge First
11:00-11:15 - Break
11:15-12:00 - Jessica Heine (Umeå): Imaginative Illusion and the Souls of Properties
12:00-13:15 - Lunch break
13:15-15:00 - Margherita Arcangeli (Paris): Aphantasia, episodic memory and creativity
15:00-15:15 - Break
15:15-16:00 - Fabiana Caserta (Umeå): Beauty is in the (Mind’s) Eye of the Beholder
18:30 - Dinner (self-paid for non speakers)
Abstracts
Pär Sundström Phenomenal Knowledge First
Mary, we tend to suppose, does not know what red looks like (or what it’s like to see red) in her black-and-white room. Then she comes to know it when she sees red. But what is it to know what red looks like? What does the knowledge that Mary gains when gets to see red consist in? I shall consider and reject three suggestions: (i) that to know what red looks like is to have experienced red; (ii) that to know what red looks like is to be able to imagine red; and (iii) that to know what red looks like is to be able to recognise red. I shall then advance an alternative “knowledge-first approach”, which says that knowledge of what red looks like is something that contributes to explaining abilities to imagine and recognise red rather than something that is explained by them. I think this casts a bit of light on the relevant knowledge. Unfortunately, it probably still leaves the phenomenon to a large degree in the dark.
Jessica Heine Imaginative Illusion and the Souls of Properties
We often imagine possibilities in which we are radically different people—or even non-persons. People sometimes purport to imagine scenarios in which a person is an entity with no notable characteristics in common with their actual self. Philosophers generally recognize that such scenarios are only potentially coherent if they include the posit of some sort of superempirical soul. Such souls must individuate persons while remaining fully untethered from any identifiable personal characteristics. They are purely normative entities.
I suggest that the imaginative illusion—the feeling that we can imagine something ultimately incoherent—which arises in cases of personal (and sometimes object) identity also occurs, in an analogous fashion, in the case of property identity. Just as you might (coherently) imagine yourself without any given characteristic, you can imagine that a certain property (redness, sphericality, “steel-ness,” etc.) appears differently to a given perceiver in a given circumstance. This ability, bolstered by abstract property concepts, sometimes gives rise to the sense that one can imagine a world in which a given property appears radically different from all perspectives. I suggest that this sense is illusory unless one posits superempirical, purely normative intrinsic “souls” of properties—mirroring those posited to individuate persons. I argue that such “property souls” are an illicit, implausible postulate of the mainstream commitment to perceptible properties bearing no necessary logical ties to how they appear from any given perspective.
Margherita Arcangeli Aphantasia, episodic memory and creativity
A recent proposal is to characterise aphantasia as an episodic memory condition. Aphantasics show difficulties in recalling details of situations from their distant and recent past, they are less confident about their episodic memories and also seem to be less emotionally affected by them. Yet they can be very creative, questioning the intuitive idea that creative processes call on episodic memory. But can we really say that aphantasics have a poor episodic memory? The aim of this talk is to analyse in depth different strands of research that challenge this view and emphasise the necessity for a more in-depth understanding of episodic memory in aphantasics, which in turn will prompt a deeper reflection on the link between episodic memory and creativity.
Fabiana Caserta
Beauty is in the (Mind’s) Eye of the Beholder
Aesthetic properties (such as being delicate, dreadful, or beautiful) are typically understood as features we experience or perceive, paradigmatically in relation to artworks, though they are also ascribable to everyday objects and situations. Crucially, such properties are sometimes thought to be attended to non-inferentially and holistically, rather than through isolated attributes. In this talk, I explore the role of mental imagery in the recollection of entities that are apt to exhibit aesthetic properties. I argue that individuals with aphantasia or weak imagery abilities, while not excluded from aesthetic engagement, may be somewhat limited in their capacity for post-perceptual aesthetic appreciation compared to strong imagers. This detriment, however, is modest and appears to have little to no impact on their creative capacities. I conclude by suggesting a possible approach designed to empirically test these claims.
