Gruppo di lettura sull'immaginazione 2025 – (Knowles 2023)

Martedì 11 marzo 2025 alle 12:30 ci sarà il secondo incontro del gruppo di lettura sull'immaginazione. In quest'occasione parleremo di Is Imagining Impossibilities Impossible? scritto da William Bondi Knowles e pubblicato presso Inquiry nel 2023. La discussione si terrà nello Scriptorium (sala della biblioteca), al secondo piano dell'unità di Filosofia, via D'Azeglio 85, Parma. L'incontro è aperto a tutte le persone interessate. Se hai bisogno di ulteriori informazioni o vuoi riceve l'articolo in formato pdf, puoi scrivere a daniele.molinari@unipr.it o wolfgang.huemer@unipr.it.

Ecco l'abstract dell'articolo:

According to what Hume termed an "establish’d maxim", nothing absolutely impossible is imaginable. It has recently been claimed against this that given the ubiquity of stipulative imagination, where one imagines a proposition simply by adding it as a stipulation about the imagined situation, it seems that we can imagine any impossibility whatsoever, even plain contradictions: all we need to do is add them as stipulations. The aim of this article is both to defend Hume’s maxim against this objection and– hopefully interestingly– to do so while granting the assumption that adding something as a stipulation is a valid way of imagining something. To this end, appeal is made to a particular development of a second Humeanism, according to which necessary truths are analytic in the sense that their truth follows from their meaning. Their analyticity, it is then argued, secures that they are true in all imagined situations. Therefore, even if it is right that a valid way of imagining something is to add it as a stipulation, attempting to stipulate that, say, some imaginary bachelor is also married is bound to fail: you can’t stipulate it to be the case because it really isn't the case.

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