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November 03, 2017
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: 136 Ross Hall

Amy Kind, from Claremont McKenna College, will present the lecture "What Imagination Teaches." It will begin at 3 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 3, and take place in 136 Ross Hall. The event is free, open to the public, and hosted by the Auburn University Philosophy Society.
 
Abstract of the lecture:  David Lewis has argued that “having an experience is the best way or perhaps the only way, of coming to know what that experience is like”; when an experience is of a sufficiently new sort, mere science lessons are not enough.  Developing this Lewisian line, L.A. Paul has suggested that some experiences are epistemically transformative. Until an individual has such an experience it remains epistemically inaccessible to her.  No amount of stories and theories and testimony from others can teach her what it is like to have it, nor is she able to achieve this knowledge by way of imaginative projection.  It’s this last claim that is the focus of this lecture. In particular, I explore the case for the claim that some experiences are in principle imaginatively inaccessible to someone who has not undergone the experience itself or one relevantly similar.  As I will suggest, this case is not as strong as is often thought. Close attention to the mechanisms of imagination suggests how techniques of imaginative scaffolding can sometimes be used to give us epistemic access to experiences we have not had, even ones that are radically different from any that we have had before. As a result, considerably fewer experiences remain imaginatively out of reach than proponents of transformative experience would have us believe. Experience may well be the best teacher, but this lecture aims to show that imagination comes in a close second.
 
For more information, contact Thomas Lockhart: tpl0002@auburn.edu