How literature expands your imagination

Bibliographic Data

ID10345366
AuthorsAntonia Peacocke (0000-0001-9543-4837, Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume103
Issue2
Pages298-319
Publication date2020-07-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8205 • E-ISSN: 1933-1592
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/phpr.12716
OpenAlexW3042522509
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited62

Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your own past experiences, as brought to mind by involuntary memory. This process gives you the opportunity to notice those phenomenal properties for the first time, and so also to form phenomenal concepts of those properties. Forming a new phenomenal concept strictly expands the range of your phenomenal imagination. It gives you the capacity to imagine more than you could have before, including certain specific kinds of experience that you yourself have never enjoyed firsthand. Literature’s capacity to expand your phenomenal imagination in this way is central to its social, moral, and epistemic value

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Imagination · Notice · Phenomenology (philosophy · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Cognitive Science and Education Research · Computer Science · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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