Believed-in Imaginings

Believed-in Imaginings
Author: Joseph De Rivera
Publisher: Amer Psychological Assn
Total Pages: 345
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781557985217

Discusses how we may come to believe in the reality of phenomena that spring from our imaginations, and the function of such imaginings in our emotional life. Varied perspectives are given from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. The authors discuss conceptual issues such as how the terms imagining, believing, and remembering are defined, as well as developmental phenomena, such as children's attachment to the Tooth Fairy and transitional objects in times of need. Other chapters investigate topics ranging from the nature of hypnotic Ss' belief in the contrafactual, to the role of dream elements in believed-in imaginings and the controversial subject of recovered memories of abuse. This book is intended to be of interest to clinical as well as theoretical psychologists and sociologists, and to any reader interested in exploring the topics of memory and imagination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Recreative Minds

Recreative Minds
Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2002
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780198238096

Recreative Minds develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon recent theories and results in psychology. Ideas about how we read the minds of others have put the concept of imagination firmly back on the agenda for philosophy and psychology. Currie and Ravenscroft present atheory of what they call imaginative projection; they show how it fits into a philosophically motivated picture of the mind and of mental states, and how it illuminates and is illuminated by recent developments in cognitive psychology. They argue that we need to recognize a category ofdesire-in-imagination, and that supposition and fantasy should be classed as forms of imagination. They accommodate some of the peculiarities of perceptual forms of imagining such as visual and motor imagery, and suggest that they are important for mind-reading. They argue for a novel view about therelations between imagination and pretence, and suggest that imagining can be, but need not be, the cause of pretending. They show how the theory accommodates but goes beyond the idea of mental simulation, and argue that the contrast between simulation and theory is neither exclusive nor exhaustive.They argue that we can understand certain developmental and psychiatric disorders as arising from faulty imagination. Throughout, they link their discussion to the uses of imagination in our encounters with art, and they conclude with a chapter on responses to tragedy. The final chapter also offersa theory of the emotions that suggests that these states have much in common with perceptual states.Currie and Ravenscroft offer a lucid exploration of a fascinating subject, for readers in philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.

Imagination in Hume's Philosophy

Imagination in Hume's Philosophy
Author: Timothy M. Costelloe
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2018-03-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1474436412

Defines the cutting-edge of scholarship on ancient Greek history employing methods from social science.

Imagining and Knowing

Imagining and Knowing
Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-02-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192636782

Works of fiction are works of the imagination and for the imagination. Gregory Currie energetically defends the familiar idea that fictions are guides to the imagination, a view which has come under attack in recent years. Responding to a number of challenges to this standpoint, he argues that within the domain of the imagination there lies a number of distinct and not well-recognized capacities which make the connection between fiction and imagination work. Currie then considers the question of whether in guiding the imagination fictions may also guide our beliefs, our outlook, and our habits in directions of learning. It is widely held that fictions very often provide opportunities for the acquisition of knowledge and of skills. Without denying that this sometimes happens, this book explores the difficulties and dangers of too optimistic a picture of learning from fiction. It is easy to exaggerate the connection between fiction and learning, to ignore countervailing tendencies in fiction to create error and ignorance, and to suppose that claims about learning from fiction require no serious empirical support. Currie makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction -- reasoning that a lot of what we take to be learning in this area is itself a kind of pretence, that we are too optimistic about the psychological and moral insights of authors, that the case for fiction as a Darwinian adaptation is weak, and that empathy is both hard to acquire and not always morally advantageous.

Only Imagine

Only Imagine
Author: Kathleen Stock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198798342

Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'. The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth: better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we 'resist' imagining certain fictions? What, in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?

Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology

Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology
Author: Tamar Gendler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2010-12-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199589763

Tamar Gendler draws together in this book a series of essays in which she investigates philosophical methodology, which is now emerging as a central topic of philosophical discussions. Three intertwined themes run through the volume: imagination, intuition and philosophical methodology. Each of the chapters focuses, in one way or another, on how we engage with subject matter that we take to be imaginary. This theme is explored in a wide range of cases, including scientific thought experiments, early childhood pretense, thought experiments concerning personal identity, fictional emotions, self-deception, Gettier cases, and the general relation of conceivability to possibility. Each of the chapters explores, in one way or another, the implications of this for how thought experiments and appeals to intuition can serve as mechanisms for supporting or refuting scientific or philosophical claims. And each of the chapters self-consciously exhibits a particular philosophical methodology: that of drawing both on empirical findings from contemporary psychology, and on classic texts in the philosophical tradition (particularly the work of Aristotle and Hume.) By exploring and exhibiting the fruitfulness of these interactions, Gendler promotes the value of engaging in such cross-disciplinary conversations in illuminating philosophical issues.

Apt Imaginings

Apt Imaginings
Author: Jonathan Gilmore
Publisher:
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190096349

Apt Imaginings addresses the question of how our emotions and desires for the contents of fictions, fantasies, and other products of the imagination relate to the feelings we have about things in the real world. A contribution to the theory of the emotions, the philosophy of fiction, and the psychology of art, this book argues that the normative criteria that determine the fit, morality, or rationality of our feelings for what we believe are distinct from those criteria that apply to what we imagine.

Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts

Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts
Author: Matthew Kieran
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0415305160

The papers in this collection examine how & in what form the notion of imagination illuminates fundamental problems in the philosophy of art.

Believed-in Imaginings

Believed-in Imaginings
Author: Joseph De Rivera
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1998
Genre: Delusions
ISBN:

Discusses how we may come to believe in the reality of phenomena that spring from our imaginations, and the function of such imaginings in our emotional life. Varied perspectives are given from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. The authors discuss conceptual issues such as how the terms imagining, believing, and remembering are defined, as well as developmental phenomena, such as children's attachment to the Tooth Fairy and transitional objects in times of need. Other chapters investigate topics ranging from the nature of hypnotic Ss' belief in the contrafactual, to the role of dream elements in believed-in imaginings and the controversial subject of recovered memories of abuse. This book is intended to be of interest to clinical as well as theoretical psychologists and sociologists, and to any reader interested in exploring the topics of memory and imagination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

Reason to Believe

Reason to Believe
Author: David Smilde
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2007-07-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520940148

Evangelical Protestantism has arguably become the fastest-growing religion in South America, if not the world. For converts, it emphasizes self-discipline and provides a network of communal support, which together have helped many overcome substance abuse, avoid crime and violence, and resolve relationship problems. But can people simply decide to believe in a religion because of the benefits it reportedly delivers? Based on extensive fieldwork among Pentecostal men in Caracas, Venezuela, this rich urban ethnography seeks an explanation for the explosion of Evangelical Protestantism, unraveling the cultural and personal dynamics of Evangelical conversion to show how and why these men make the choice to convert, and how they come to have faith in a new system of beliefs and practices.