I provide a novel, non-reductive, action-first skill-based account of active imagining. I call it the Skillful Action Account of Imagining (the skillful action account for short). According to this account, to actively imagine something is to form a representation of that thing, where the agent’s forming that representation and selecting its content together constitute a means to the completion of some imaginative project. Completing imaginative projects stands to the active formation of the relevant representations as an end. The account thus (...) bakes in the means-end order that some in action theory take to be definitional of intentional action. Moreover, in the spirit of this conception of intentional action, I hold that a central feature of the means-end order exhibited in active imagining is the agent’s direct non-observational knowledge both of her act of imagining and of its having this order. The agent knows that she’s actively imagining (that-)p and knows why she actively imagines this–to carry on the pretense, engage in the fiction, predict another’s behavior, reason about possibility or necessity, reason about contingent matters of fact, just imagine for its own sake, and so on. I show that the account accounts for the possibility of misimagining while holding onto the idea that we imagine what we intend to imagine. I likewise show that the account unifies imagining across types of imaginative project like those just listed in a way that tolerates conflict in the roles that imagining plays in the mental economy across those projects. Finally, I show that the account can accommodate passive imagining like involuntary and automatic imagining as well as mind wandering. -/- Acknowledgments: I'd like to thank Amy Kind, Robert Brandom, Colin Allen, Peter Langland-Hassan, Alison Springle, Daniel Munro, Nick Wiltsher, and Andrew Rubner for excellent comments on earlier drafts from which this paper greatly benefited. I'd also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments. And I'd like to thank participants of the 2022 Simulationism Conference hosted by the Centre for Philosophy of Memory and the 4th Annual Conference [Online/Virtual] for Imagination Domination (COVID) hosted by Amy Kind for excellent feedback on earlier versions of the paper. (shrink)

The temporal structure for motivating, monitoring, and making sense of agency depends on encoding, maintaining, and accessing the right contents at the right times. These functions are facilitated by memory. Moreover, in informing action, memory is itself often active. That remembering is essential to and an expression of agency and is often active suggests that it is a type of action. Despite this, Galen Strawson (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103, 227–257, 2003) and Alfred Mele (2009) deny that remembering is (...) an action. They claim that memory fails to admit of control. Remembering is automatic—once remembering starts, the process can neither be stopped nor intervened on. Moreover, the agent does not initiate remembering. An agent has control over an event or process if and only if she has the capacity and opportunity to initiate and intervene on that event or process. Actions are events over which an agent has control. Since it is automatic, we fail to have control over remembering. Thus, remembering is not an action. In this paper, I draw out an assumption of Strawson’s and Mele’s accounts: an event-type whose tokens exhibit automaticity cannot, for that reason, be an action (§2). Against this assumption, I draw parallels between skilled bodily action and memory. I show that memory exhibits two defining features of skill: it can be learned with practice and it admits of attributions of excellence (§3). These features reveal how intelligent control is exerted in the exercise of skill despite apparent automaticity—control is gained over time (§4). Since exercises of skill are by definition actions and since memory exemplifies the defining features of skill, memory is a skill and instances of remembering are actions too. (shrink)

Cancer biology features the ascription of normal functions to parts of cancers. At least some ascriptions of function in cancer biology track local normality of parts within the global abnormality of the aberration to which those parts belong. That is, cancer biologists identify as functions activities that, in some sense, parts of cancers are supposed to perform, despite cancers themselves having no purpose. The present paper provides a theory to accommodate these normal function ascriptions—I call it the Modeling Account of (...) Normal Function (MA). MA comprises two claims. First, normal functions are activities whose performance by the function-bearing part contributes to the self-maintenance of the whole system and, thereby, results in the continued presence of that part. Second, MA holds that models of system-level activities that are (partly) constitutive of self-maintenance are improved by including a representation of the relevant function-bearing part and by making reference to the activity/activities that part performs which contribute(s) to those system-level activities. I contrast MA with two other accounts that seek to explicate the ascription of normal functions in biology, namely, the organizational account and the selected effects account. Both struggle to extend to cancer biology. However, I offer ecumenical readings which allow them to recover some ascriptions of normal function to parts of cancers. So, though I contend that MA excels in this respect, the purpose of this paper is served if it provides materials for bridging the gap between cancer biology, philosophy of cancer, and the literature on function. (shrink)

Cancer biologists ascribe normal functions to parts of cancer. Normal functions are activities that parts of systems are in some minimal sense supposed to perform. Cancer biologists’ finding normality within the abnormality of cancer pose difficulties for two main approaches to normal function. One approach claims that normal functions are activities that parts are selected for. However, some parts of cancers that have normal functions aren’t selected to perform them. The other approach claims that normal functions are part-activities typical for (...) the system and that contribute to survival/reproduction. However, cancers are too heterogeneous to establish what’s typical across a type. (shrink)

Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA)” according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic events. The TUA is not obviously based in mere distrust of women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, etc. Rather, it seeks to justify skepticism on epistemic and empirical grounds. We consider how the TUA might appeal to the (...) psychology and neuroscience of memory for empirical support. However, we argue that neither support the TUA. (shrink)

This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally intact adults under normal conditions can token experiential memories of particular events from the personal past (merely) by intending or trying (...) to. An agent’s ability to actively remember depends not only on her being able to determine that some memory event occurs but on her ability to construct the relevant scene at will as well. I claim that the ability to guide construction with respect to imagistic-content is distinctive feature of a subset of active imagining. Episodic remembering is of a kind with that subset of active imagining by being a process of agential construction of imagistic-content, in this case, scene construction that aims at (veridically) representing the personal past. Agential scene construction in the context of remembering is the agent’s exploring her personal past as a highly circumscribed region of modal space. (shrink)

Offering a theory of new media, this book places the recent developments within the history of visual culture of the last few centuries. The reliance on old conventions as well as ideas unique to new media are explored, with particular emphasis on the role of the cinema.

Public discourse implicitly appeals to what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument” (TUA). To motivate, articulate, and assess the TUA, we appeal to Hawley’s (2019) commitment account of trust and trustworthiness. On Hawley’s account, being trustworthy consists in the successful avoidance of unfulfilled commitments and involves three components: the actual avoidance of unfulfilled commitments, sincerity in one’s taking on elective commitments, and competence in fulfilling commitments one has incurred. In contexts of testimony, what’s at issue is the speaker’s competence and (...) sincere intention to speak truthfully. The TUA targets trauma victims’ competence rather than their sincerity. According to the TUA, empirical evidence shows that trauma undermines victims’ trustworthiness with regard to speaking truthfully about their trauma by undermining their competence to remember the relevant event. We argue that what the evidence shows is rather that remembering traumatic events involves a distinct “mode of manifesting” the competence to remember particular events from the personal past. Trauma victims are competent to speak truthfully about their trauma and ought to be trusted at least with regard to the central details of the event. By suggesting otherwise, the TUA threatens an insidious form of epistemic injustice which Hawley’s account helps us locate. (shrink)

Infinite Awareness pairs Woollacott’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the her mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, she breaks open the definition of human consciousness to investigate the existence of a non-physical mind.

Marjorie Lewis draws on her own experience of breaking through the glass ceiling to become the first woman President of the United Theological College of the West Indies. Through this, she considers the theological and biblical perspectives on gender equality, internalized and unrecognized inequality, naming and exorcising abuse in institutional relationships and strategies to survive and thrive. At the heart is a rejection of the notion that all suffering is to be embraced unchallenged as part of the Christian experience (...) and that it is the particular calling of women. This can lead to overwork, burn out and a lack of self care. (shrink)

Pregnancy leave and comparable worth deal with differences between female and male employees. In each case feminists are divided as to whether special treatment for women will promote equality or reinforce sex stereotypes and gender based segregation in the workplace. A radical restructuring of the workplace is necessary, to make possible a more human life for men and women. This restructuring is articulated in terms of the concepts of equality as "participation" or "incorporation" of all individuals into a community, and (...) androgyny. (shrink)

Endeavours to map out a piece of the intellectual history of this century which once almost faded from memory. In 1941 William Temple, then Archbishop of York, called for a Christian social philosophy and in so doing voiced a concern that had been gathering momentum all through the 30s, sharpened by the challenge of authoritarian regimes, left and right, and had formed the focus of the Oxford Conference of Church, Community and State in 1937.

Illustrates the similarities between the enslavement of Black people and the enslavement of animals in both the past and the present.

Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. "This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to (...) expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, _American Literature_ "[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, _Boston Review_ "_Wittgenstein's Ladder_ offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, _Chicago Review_ "Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic.... Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, _Sub-Stance_. (shrink)

The Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script contains data that shed light on 3 major issues central to current metaphor studies: (a) Where is metaphor, that is, is metaphor linguistic or conceptual? (b) If metaphor is indeed conceptual, does metaphor understanding entail creation of an ad hoc category in which the vehicle is a particularly good exemplar? (c) Is metaphor processing primarily dependent on the identification and activation of the underlying "deep structure" conceptual metaphor? The script includes an elaborate system of classifiers (...) that constitute an intensely motivated, highly constrained categorization system strictly referring to conceptual, nonlinguistic configurations. The Egyptian system is a prototype-centered classification system, from which metaphor clearly emerges as a form of alternative classification. (shrink)

This essential work is made up of eight interrelated essays grouped to elucidate two major themes -- Descartes's role in the dilemma of modern philosophy, and ...

Mental actions are things we do with our minds. Consider inferring, deliberating, imagining, remembering, calculating, and so on. I introduce a non-reductive alternative to standard causalist accounts of mental action that understands such action in terms of dispositions for performing mental actions. I call this alternative the powers framework. On the powers framework, habitual and skillful mental actions are themselves infused with practical intelligence by being expressions of the agent’s rational tendencies and capacities, respectively. The intelligence exemplified in the performance (...) of habitual and skillful mental actions stems from the agent’s having shaped the corresponding tendencies and capacities through training and practice. In this way, mental habits and skills are ‘second nature’ to us. I substantiate the powers framework by giving an account of imagining as a type of skillful mental action. In particular, I argue that imagination is a power to construct representations and select their contents as a means to performing learned behaviors like pretending, engaging with fiction, predicting others’ behavior, reasoning about possibility and necessity, reasoning hypothetically or counterfactually about contingent matters of fact, and even imagining for its own sake. I extend the account of imagining to episodic remembering. I argue that such remembering, considered as a mental action, is a kind of imagining by virtue of the agent’s constructing a representation and selecting its content as a means of performing the learned behavior of navigating her personal past. (shrink)