Imaginative projects and imaginative success — The Junkyard

A post by Nick Wiltsher Sometimes, you succeed at imagining. Sometimes, you don’t. How do you, we, or anyone work out whether or not you’ve succeeded? Here’s a simple answer: establish what you were...

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Come JAM with us! A conference in honor of ten years of The Junkyard — The Junkyard

A post by Amy Kind Way back in 2016, Eric Peterson came to me with an unexpected idea:  What if we started a blog on imagination?  I was intrigued, but also hesitant.  Could we reall...

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When the Mind Goes Blank — The Junkyard

A post by Angelica Kaufmann “Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat. … In sho...

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Murdoch's Truth-Seeking Imagination — The Junkyard

A post by Idil Çakmur There is a simplicity to a life without the imagination. An unimaginative person might be frightfully dull, but at least they have a firm footing in reality, while the imaginati...

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Leibniz’s ‘Logic of the Imagination’ — The Junkyard

A post by Lloyd Strickland Philosophers have traditionally drawn a sharp boundary between the province of imagination and that of logic (see for example Malebranche 1997, 87-195; Spinoza 2002, 2...

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Beyond constraints: value-guided vs. unguided imagining — The Junkyard

A post by Julia Langkau Suppose you are preparing for a difficult conversation with a friend. You imagine how the exchange might unfold: what you might say, how your friend might respond, and how the...

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Imaginative Metaethics — The Junkyard

A post by Luke Roelofs What if the philosophy of imagination held the key to moral objectivity? That idea was what drew me into the sub-field in the first place, and now I’ve gone and published a b...

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Fission-Fusion Imagination for Freedom of Thought, Ethics and AI — The Junkyard

A post by Miranda Anderson Understanding imagination as something that is not merely brain-bound or individualistic can help to expand our ambitions for the development of technologies including arti...

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Imagination-Oriented Design — The Junkyard

A post by Monika Dunin-Kozicka Imagine the School of Imagination. If you attended such a school, you would engage in various imagination exercises and assignments every day—so that your imaginative s...

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Acting, the Imagination, and Performance — The Junkyard

A post by Bruce G. Shapiro "There are two requisites in every systematic treatise: the author must first define his subject, and secondly, though this is really more important, he must show us how an...

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Imagination without Imagery: The challenge of aphantasia — The Junkyard

A post by Georgina Brighouse Can you imagine a bright red apple sitting on a table? Or a sunset over the ocean with orange and pink clouds? These are examples of imagistic imagination. Visual mental...

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Two Sources of Imaginative Pleasure — The Junkyard

A post by Vincenzo Grasso “Emma was not sleeping, she was pretending to be asleep; and while he dozed off next to her, she would grow more wakeful, dreaming other dreams. [...] Often, from the t...

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Models in Suspension: Imagination and the Structure of Scientific Understanding — The Junkyard

A post by Ana Elisa Ulloa Labariega Imagine a mobile—the kind that hangs above a child’s bed. Glass figures suspended at different lengths, each positioned in relation to the others. The structure is...

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The Paradox of Scientific Fiction — The Junkyard

A post by Zachary Srivastava Over the past five to ten years, there’s been a surge of interest in the role of imagination in science, particularly since the release of The Scientific Imagination , e...

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Aphantasia and mental imagery: a call for interdisciplinary collaboration (IRCA 2026 announcement) — The Junkyard

A post by Christian O. Scholz, Jianghao Liu, and Andrea Blomkvist In this blog post, we will argue that aphantasia rightfully ascended from a niche curiosity to a hot topic across the cognitive scien...

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Striving to Imagine Other Animals’ Minds — The Junkyard

A post by Luca Marchetti One of the best popular-science books I’ve read in recent years is Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us . It’s a guided tour of h...

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Imagination on the Cusp of Impossibility — The Junkyard

A post by Zach Kohler There is something strange about the experience of theatrical magic. Anyone who has watched a good magic trick knows the feeling—it presents itself without fanfare, yet leaves u...

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Imagination in Learning and Creativity — The Junkyard

A post by Kerry Clark Introduction Imagination is used in many ways—whether in daydreaming, anticipating future outcomes, or engaging in creative works. I take imagination to be (roughly) the ment...

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The Discovery of Imagination — The Junkyard

A post by Avshalom Schwartz   The safest general characterization of the history of imagination is that it begins with Plato. Indeed, this is a rare point of agreement between scholars—from int...

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Why do we rewatch fictions—but not sports? — The Junkyard

A post by Neil Van Leeuwen In the background as I write this blog, the Superbowl is on. The Seahawks currently lead 6-0 in the second quarter, which makes me vaguely happy, since I dislike the Patrio...

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Grieving Imagined Futures — The Junkyard

A post by Hannah Fasnacht «Wie geht’s?» fragte die Trauer die Hoffnung. «Ich bin etwas traurig», sagte die Hoffnung. «Hoffentlich», sagte die Trauer. —Franz Hohler “How are you?” Sadness asked ...

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Can We Imagine New Emotions? — The Junkyard

A post by Irene Lonigro According to a venerable philosophical tradition, imagination builds upon experiences we have already had (Nagel, 1974; Paul, 2014). I cannot imagine what it feels like to tas...

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The world of image — The Junkyard

A post by Reza Hadisi In one of his commentaries, al‑Shahrazūrī (d. ca. 1288) cites and elaborates on an enigmatic passage from Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of the Ishrāqī philosophical movement...

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Imagination, Autonomy, and Really Big Numbers — The Junkyard

A post by Ansley Avis “It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10?” -Lucille Bluth , Arrested Development Imagine an elephant. Got it? Perfect. How many toenails does it have? Your ele...

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Delirium, the imagination and altered states — The Junkyard

A post by Dorothy Wade In my work as an intensive care psychologist, I frequently hear from patients about the vivid and frightening experiences they undergo. Bombarded by hallucinations and delusion...

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Episodic Construction: Compositional or Associative? — The Junkyard

A post by Joshua Myers and Johannes Mahr. Imagination and episodic memory are intimately linked. Imagination draws on previous experience—when picturing yourself on a beach in Portugal sipping mango ...

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A Unique Epistemic Value for Imagination? — The Junkyard

A post by Eric Peterson In a recent post on this wonderful blog, Nick Wiltsher discusses three interrelated claims of which he is increasingly sympathetic towards.  These are: (1) Imagination...

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What is it like to have aphantasia? — The Junkyard

A post by Raquel Krempel Imagine an apple. Nothing happened? You probably have aphantasia. This is a common way of introducing and thinking about aphantasia. On the web, images such as Figure 1 (bel...

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The Text-Conditioned Image — The Junkyard

A post by Julia Minarik And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life – or while the machine is recording – will be like an alphabet with which the image ...

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Are we aware of neural activity in imagination? The attention model of conscious imagery and aphantasia — The Junkyard

A post by Jianghao Liu Please imagine a red Gala apple. Is it darker or lighter than a cherry? Most of us can easily conjure a mental image, a perceptual-like experience that feels almost as if we we...

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