Date and time: July 2, Tuesday, 11:30 a.m.

Location: Carlos Santamaría Building, Room B14.

Speaker: Maria Jimena Clavel (University of St. Andrews)

Title: Embodying imagination

Abstract:

This piece is part of a larger project that aims at showing that imagination is constrained as a consequence of its embodied character and that explores the consequences of that thesis in our engagement with art and in our social interactions. Traditionally, we think of imagination as a paradigmatic case of offline cognition, i.e. cognitive endeavors that do not directly involve real-time adaptive interactions with our surroundings. In this piece we challenge this more traditional understanding of imagination and argue that exercises of imagination are embodied. We examine two embodied approaches to imagination that can be found in the literature: a radical enactive approach (see Hutto 2006, Medina 2013) and a predictive approach to imagination (see Kirchhoff 2017); and what it means for imagination to be embodied from the perspective of these two approaches. From the perspective of the first approach, our imaginative engagements are a re-enactment of our interactions with the environment and are better understood by referring to agent-world dynamics. From the perspective of the second approach, imagination is supported by the same predictive mechanism that supports perception. Here we explore the possibility of a middle ground between these two positions in what concerns imagination, and the notion of embodiment that stems from it. Importantly, one consequence of this approach is that imagination is constrained by its embodied character.