Fabian Dorsch - Böcker

In Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory a group of distinguished contributors examine how perceptual imagination and memory resemble and differ from each other and from other kinds of sensory experience.They question the role each plays in perception and in the acquisition of knowledge. The collection discusses the epistemic roles that the imagination and memory play in our mental lives. It pushes forward the debates about the nature of perceptual imagination and perceptual memory. This innovative study will encourage future discussions on these interesting topics by students and scholars in the field.This volume presents ten new essays on the nature of perceptual imagination and perceptual memory, framed by an introductory overview of these topics. How do perceptual imagination and memory resemble and differ from each other and from other kinds of sensory experience? And what role does each play in perception and in the acquisition of knowledge? These are the two central questions that the contributors seek to address.

Many different features of the world figure consciously in our perceptual experiences, in the sense that they make a subjective difference to those experiences. These features are thought to range from colours and shapes, to volumes and backsides, from natural or artefactual kinds, to reasons for perceptual belief, and from the existence and externality of objects, to the relationality and wakeful-ness of our perceptual awareness of them. Phenomenal Presence explores the different ways in which features like these may be phenomenally present in perceptual experience. In particular, it focuses on features that are rarely discussed, and the perceptual presence of which is more controversial or less obvious because they are out of view or otherwise easily overlooked; for example, they are given in a non-sensory manner, or they are categorical in the sense that they feature in all perceptual experiences (such as their justificatory power, their wakefulness, or the externality of their objects). The book divides into four parts, each dealing with a different kind of phenomenal presence. The first addresses the nature of the presence of perceptual constancies and variations, while the second investigates the determinacy and ubiquity of the presence of spatial properties in perception. The third part deals with the presence of hidden or occluded aspects of objects, while part four discusses the presence of categorical aspects of perceptual experience. The contributions provide a thorough examination of which features are phenomenally present in perception, and what it is for them to figure in experience in this way.

In this highly ambitious, wide ranging, immensely impressive and ground-breaking work Fabian Dorsch surveys just about every account of the imagination that has ever been proposed. He identifies five central types of imagining that any unifying theory must accommodate and sets himself the task of determining whether any theory of what imagining consists in covers these five paradigms. Focussing on what he takes to be the three main theories, and giving them each equal consideration, he faults the first two and embraces the third. The scholarship is immaculate, the writing crystal clear and the argumentation always powerful. Malcolm Budd, FBA, Emeritus Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College LondonExcerptOpen publication