Can we imagine the impossible? While the impossibilists give an affirmative answer to this question, the anti-impossibilists claim that imagination is limited to the possible and correspondingly deny that impossibilities are imaginable. My own sympathies lie with the former camp, and the aim of this paper is to make the case for impossibilism. The discussion proceeds in roughly three stages. In Section 1, I clarify the debate. This consists of two main tasks: elucidating the notion of impossibility involved and elucidating what imagination is and how it differs from other speculative states like supposition. In Section 2, I consider what I call the appeal to introspection, the key move often made by the anti-impossibilist in defending their position, and I aim to show why this appeal should be rejected. In Section 3, I turn more directly to a defense of impossibilism. As we will see, the defense requires the impossibilist to explain how impossibilities might be imagined. After first discussing two impossibilist strategies that I think turn out to be unsuccessful, I then turn to two more promising strategies: what I call the pathway strategy and what I call the disguise strategy.

Philosophers of mind have extensively debated the intuition that experience provides unique knowledge. Responding to influential thought experiments by Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson and others, philosophers have developed a series of replies to the question of ‘what experience teaches’. Aside from these theoretical considerations, the same intuition (i.e., that experience generates knowledge) forms the foundation of a rapidly increasing development in psychiatry, namely the practice of expertise-by-experience, which is premised on the intuition that former patients have unique and complementary knowledge based on their lived experience with mental illness. However, the practice of expertise-by-experience is hindered by the same theoretical problem that philosophers have addressed: it is very difficult to pin down what experience teaches, exactly, and hence how we might justify or legitimize the role of experts-by-experience for specific tasks and roles.

Much of human imagining is to partake in one of the many practices of imagining that have been developed in human cultures. Much of human imagination is as much an essentially social phenomenon as speaking is.

I will explicate and substantiate these claims by referring to a particular historical episode of social imagination engineering: the building of Sacri Monti in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and its explicitly intended use as shapers of the imagination by the conservative religious reformer Carolo Borromeo.

Returning to theory, I will argue that a proper understanding of this example illustrates important consequences for theoretical issues in the philosophy of imagination. First it shows how problematic the idea of imagination as by default disembodied is. Second, it shows that what an e-theorist has to do is not to deny the existence of representational phenomena, but rather to give an embodied, practice-based theory of representational phenomena. Third, and somewhat more far-fetched, I’ll argue that the proposed conception of imagination throws light on the question whether animals imagine as well as on the question whether memory can be conceived of as a form of ‘imagining the past’.

Imagery essentialism is the philosophical position that only mental states that involve sensory imagination, that is, the (quasi-)sensory experience of imagery content, should qualify as imagination (Gregory, 2016; Kind, 2001). An implication of this position is that people with global aphantasia, i.e., people who are unable to use sensory imagination in all sense modalities (Zeman et al., 2025), would be labeled as being incapable of imagination. I will argue that this implication is so undesirable that it should make us reconsider imagery essentialism. Furthermore, by drawing inspiration from the works of Ryle and Wittgenstein, as well as discussing recent experimental results from aphantasia research, I will propose a competency-based account of imagination, which, albeit not going fully ‘imageless’, aims to loosen the grip that imagery (experience) currently exerts on the concept of imagination.

Keywords: imagination, imagery, imagery essentialism, aphantasia

References:

Gregory, D. (2016). Imagination and mental imagery. In A. Kind (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of philosophy of imagination (pp. 97–110). Routledge.

Kind, A. (2001). Putting the image back in imagination. Philosophy and phenomenological research, 62(1), 85-109.

Zeman, A., Monzel, M., Pearson, J., Scholz, C. O., & Simner, J. (2025). Aphantasia. Cortex, 182, 212-213.

Mind wandering—the drift of thought away from an ongoing task or while at rest—is often regarded as a mere lapse in cognitive control. This perspective is challenged by reframing mind wandering as a subtle yet significant expression of spontaneous agency. A detailed structural analysis reveals that a mind wandering episode typically consists of several segments, each involving distinct topics (semantic content) and diverse mental activities (e.g., memory, imagination, planning), often connected by automatic associations. This structural view allows for a precise determination of mind wandering’s controlled and spontaneous components. While the initiation of the entire episode and the transitions between segments are normally automatic, the process is not devoid of control. The whole episode occurs under the condition of perceptual decoupling, which relies on inhibitory control, and the unfolding of each segment is supported by working-memory capacity. Critically, the content of these segments is far from random; instead, it is often guided by personal goals and concerns. Therefore, mind wandering can be understood as an emergent mental process, arising from the specific dynamic interaction between controlled elements (such as goal representations, working memory, and inhibitory control) and spontaneous elements, thereby constituting spontaneous agency.

The term imagination refers to a heterogeneous range of mental states and experiences (Kind 2013), yet what unites these under a single conceptual category remains an open question (Nanay 2023). One influential view—what Wiltsher (2019) calls the imitation theory—holds that the essential feature of imagination lies in its capacity to imitate, recreate, or simulate other mental states. This model underpins prominent accounts, from Walton’s (1990) theory of fiction, to Currie and Ravenscroft’s (2002) notion of re-creative imagination, as well as Peacocke’s (1985) and Dokic and Arcangeli’s (2015) accounts of experiential imagination.

Despite its explanatory value in the philosophy of mind, the imitation model has significant limitations—especially regarding the epistemic role of imagination. It risks reducing imagination’s epistemic power to that of a mere surrogate for perception. In this talk, I argue for rethinking the essential feature of imaginative experience. Rather than imitation, I propose that imagination is best characterized by its re-combinatorial power—its ability to draw on diverse mental states and combine them in novel ways. This shift brings imagination closer to models of linguistic creativity, better captures its diverse manifestations, and, crucially, offers a clearer account of its unique epistemic power.

Depersonalisation is typically described as a distressing experience of detachment from self and world, characterised by feelings of disembodiment, emotional neutrality, and alienation, as if one were an external observer of one’s own mental and bodily processes. However, empirical research consistently highlights experiential dimensions systematically neglected by contemporary clinical and theoretical frameworks. These overlooked dimensions encompass heightened interconnectedness, blurred self-other boundaries, expanded spatiality and timelessness, intensified empathic resonance, and episodes of self-transcendence.

To address this critical explanatory gap, I propose a novel philosophical account integrating Eugene Gendlin’s phenomenology of radical embodiment and situatedness with Karl Jaspers’s existential ontology of boundary situations and authentic selfhood (Existenz). Current theories within 4E cognition, despite surpassing earlier cognitivist and individualistic approaches, implicitly retain an ontological dualism separating organism and environment. By contrast, Gendlin reconceptualises body-environment interaction as fundamentally nondual—an indivisible dynamic process from which experiences of self, environment, space, and time emerge as secondary derivative phenomena. Similarly, Jaspers’s notion of Existenz dissolves the subject-object dichotomy, identifying authentic self as emerging within existential boundary situations (Grenzsituationen)—limit-experiences such as suffering, anxiety, struggle, loss, and death, which compel us to confront the intrinsic contingency of our self-conceptions and empirical existence.

My central thesis is that depersonalisation represents such a boundary situation. Negatively, it manifests as pathological alienation resulting from the breakdown of dualistic psychological structures of selfhood. Positively, however, it can actualise radical existential openness and the genuine possibility for self-transformation and transcendence. The proposed account provides theoretical insights and therapeutic implications absent from prevailing paradigms, thus advancing our philosophical and clinical understanding of depersonalisation.

Keywords: Depersonalisation, Existential Phenomenology, Radical Embodiment, Boundary Situations, Authentic Selfhood, Self-Transcendence