Monographs by Fabian Dorsch
Please send me an email (fabian.dorsch@unifr.ch) if you wish to receive the draft of the first ha... more Please send me an email (fabian.dorsch@unifr.ch) if you wish to receive the draft of the first half of the book.
Please send me an email (fabian.dorsch@unifr.ch) if you wish to receive a copy of the book. — 'In... more Please send me an email (fabian.dorsch@unifr.ch) if you wish to receive a copy of the book. — 'In this highly ambitious, wide ranging, immensely impressive and ground-breaking work Fabian Dorsch surveys just about every account of the imagination that has ever been proposed. He identifies five central types of imagining that any unifying theory must accommodate and sets himself the task of determining whether any theory of what imagining consists in covers these five paradigms. Focussing on what he takes to be the three main theories, and giving them each equal consideration, he faults the first two and embraces the third. The scholarship is immaculate, the writing crystal clear and the argumentation always powerful.' (Malcolm Budd)
This dissertation provides a theory of the nature of aesthetic experiences on the basis of a theo... more This dissertation provides a theory of the nature of aesthetic experiences on the basis of a theory of aesthetic values. It results in the formulation of the following necessary conditions for an experience to be aesthetic:(i) it must consist of a (complex) representation of an object and an accompanying feeling;(ii) the representation must instantiate an intrinsic value; and (iii) the feeling must be the recognition of that value and bestow it on the object.
Journal Articles by Fabian Dorsch
In recent years, it has become popular again to endorse relationalism about perception. According... more In recent years, it has become popular again to endorse relationalism about perception. According to this view, perceptions are essentially relational experiences and thus differ in nature from non-relational hallucinations. In this article, I assume that relationalism is true. The issue that I am generally interested in is rather which version of relationalism we should endorse, given that perceptions are relational. The standard answer to this question is Acquaintance Relationalism, the view that perceptions are relational in so far as they acquaint us with objects in our environment. But my contention is that this view cannot account for two important aspects of perfect hallucinations, namely their property of being introspectively indistinguishable from perceptions and their property of having the same motivational force as veridical perceptions. Which alternative form of relationism should be endorsed instead (if any) is then an issue to be discussed at another ocassion.
The recent debate on cognitive phenomenology has largely focused on phenomenal aspects connected ... more The recent debate on cognitive phenomenology has largely focused on phenomenal aspects connected to the content of thoughts. By contrasts, aspects pertaining to their attitude have often been neglected, despite the fact that they are distinctive of the mental kind of thought concerned and, moreover, also present in experiences and thus less contentious than purely cognitive aspects. My main goal is to identify two central and closely related aspects of attitude that are phenomenologically salient and shared by thoughts with experiences, namely the rational role that they play in our mental lives and their determination by factors external to them, such as external objects or reasons. In particular, I aim to defend Phenomenal Rationalism about judgemental thoughts and perceptual experiences: the view that their phenomenal character reflects their rational role, that is, their capacity to provide and/or respond to reasons. I conclude with some remarks about how this view may be extended to other kinds of thought and experience; and about how the phenomenological salience of the specific rational role of individual judgemental thoughts may in fact be used to formulate also an argument for the phenomenological salience of their particular propositional contents.
In this article, I defend the view that we can acquire factual knowledge – that is, contingent pr... more In this article, I defend the view that we can acquire factual knowledge – that is, contingent propositional knowledge about certain (perceivable) aspects of reality – on the basis of imaginative experience. More specifically, I argue that, under suitable circumstances, imaginative experiences can rationally determine the propositional content of knowledge-constituting beliefs – though not their attitude of belief – in roughly the same way as perceptual experiences do in the case of perceptual knowledge. I also highlight some philosophical consequences of this conclusion, especially for the issue of whether imagination can help us to learn something from fictions.
In this paper, I describe and discuss two mental phenomena which are somewhat neglected in the ph... more In this paper, I describe and discuss two mental phenomena which are somewhat neglected in the philosophy of mind: focused daydreaming and mind-wandering. My aim is to show that their natures are rather distinct, despite the fact that we tend to classify both as instances of daydreaming. The first difference between the two, I argue, is that, while focused daydreaming is an instance of imaginative mental agency (i.e. mental agency with the purpose to voluntarily produce certain mental representations), mind-wandering is not – though this does not mean that mind-wandering cannot involve mental agency at all. This personal-level difference in agency and purposiveness has, furthermore, the consequence that instances of mind-wandering do not constitute unified and self-contained segments of the stream of consciousness – in stark contrast to focused daydreams. Besides, the two kinds of mental phenomena differ in whether they possess a narrative structure, and in how we may make sense of the succession of mental episodes involved.
In this article, I present two objections against the view that aesthetic judgements – that is, j... more In this article, I present two objections against the view that aesthetic judgements – that is, judgemental ascriptions of aesthetic qualities like elegance or harmony – are justified non-inferentially. The first is that this view cannot make sense of our practice to support our aesthetic judgements by reference to lower-level features of the objects concerned. The second objection maintains that non-inferentialism about the justification of aesthetic judgements cannot explain why our aesthetic interest in artworks and other objects is limited to only some of their lower-level features that realise their higher-level aesthetic qualities. Although my concern with the view that aesthetic judgements are subject to non-inferential justification is very general, my discussion is primarily structured around Sibley’s well-developed and influential version of this view.
Page 1. Emotional Imagining and Our Responses to Fiction Fabian Dorsch (fabian.dorsch@ uclmail.ne... more Page 1. Emotional Imagining and Our Responses to Fiction Fabian Dorsch (fabian.dorsch@ uclmail.net) May 3, 2010 Discussions about imagining normally concentrate on the imaginative counterparts of per-ception and judgemental thought (or occurrent belief). ...
My primary aim in this article is to provide a philosophical account of the unity of hallucinatio... more My primary aim in this article is to provide a philosophical account of the unity of hallucinations, which can capture both perceptual hallucinations (which are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions) and non-perceptual hallucinations (all others). Besides, I also mean to clarify further the division of labour and the nature of the collaboration between philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Assuming that the epistemic conception of hallucinations put forward by M. G. F. Martin and others is largely on the right track, I will focus on two main tasks: (a) to provide a satisfactory phenomenology of the subjective character of perceptions and perceptual hallucinations and (b) to redress the philosophers’ neglect of non-perceptual hallucinations. More specifically, I intend to apply one of the central tenets of the epistemic conception—that hallucinations can and should be positively characterised in terms of their phenomenological connections to perceptions—to non-perceptual hallucinations as well. That is, I will try to show that we can positively specify the class of non-perceptual hallucinations by reference to the distinctive ways in which we first-personally experience them and perceptions in consciousness. The task of saying more about their underlying third-personal nature may then be left to the cognitive sciences.
During the last ten years or so, there has been a noticeable surge of interest in disjunctivism, ... more During the last ten years or so, there has been a noticeable surge of interest in disjunctivism, accompanied by the emergence of many different promising disjunctivist positions on a large variety of philosophical issues. However, this positive development has yet to lead to a change in the general attitude towards disjunctivism, which is often one of prevailing scepticism or even disregard. It is still not rare to dismiss disjunctivism right from the start as too implausible or abstruse to be considered as a serious alternative to other views.
One prominent ambition of theories of colour is to pay full justice to how colours are subjective... more One prominent ambition of theories of colour is to pay full justice to how colours are subjectively given to us; and another to reconcile this first-personal perspective on colours with the third-personal one of the natural sciences. The goal of this article is to question whether we can satisfy ...
British Journal of Aesthetics, 2005
Hegel's Theory of Imagination. By jennifer ann bates. State University of New York Press. 20... more Hegel's Theory of Imagination. By jennifer ann bates. State University of New York Press. 2004. pp. xlv + 202. $50. In this book, Jennifer Ann Bates engages in a very detailed and well-supported exegesis of Hegel's various discussions of the imagination. Although ...
Book Chapters by Fabian Dorsch
This is the original, longer draft for my entry on 'Hume' in the 'The Routledge Handbook of Philo... more This is the original, longer draft for my entry on 'Hume' in the 'The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination' (Amy Kind (ed.), London: Routledge, 2016). — Please always cite the Routledge version, unless there are passages concerned that did not make it into the Handbook for reasons of length. — This chapter overviews Hume’s thoughts on the nature and the role of imagining, with an almost exclusive focus on the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature. Over the course of this text, Hume draws and discusses three important distinctions among our conscious mental episodes (or what he calls ‘perceptions’): (i) between impressions (including perceptual experiences) and ideas (including recollections, imaginings and occurrent beliefs); (ii) between ideas of the memory and ideas of the imagination; and (iii), among the ideas of the imagination, between ideas of the judgement (i.e. occurrent beliefs) and ideas of the fancy (i.e. imaginings). I discuss each distinction in turn, also in connection to contemporary views on imagining. In addition, I briefly consider Hume’s views on the imagination as a faculty aimed at the production of ideas, as well as on the role that imagining plays in the wider context of our mental lives, notably in the acquisition of modal knowledge and in the comprehension of, and resistance to, stories and opinions that we take to be false or fictional.
Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in, 2016
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Monographs by Fabian Dorsch
Journal Articles by Fabian Dorsch
Book Chapters by Fabian Dorsch
Table of Contents:
Introduction and Acknowledgements
Part I Wittgenstein and Seeing-as
1. The Room in a View
Charles Travis
Part II Difficulties with Wollheim’s Borrowing from Wittgenstein
2. Seeing Aspects and Telling Stories about It
Joachim Schulte
3. Aspects of Perception
Avner Baz
4. Aspect-perception, Perception and Animals: Wittgenstein and Beyond
Hans-Johann Glock
5. Wittgenstein’s Seeing as: A Survey of Various Contexts
Volker A. Munz
Part III Benefits from Wollheim’s Borrowing from Wittgenstein
6. Leonardo’s Challenge: Wittgenstein and Wollheim at the Intersection of Perception and Projection Garry L. Hagberg
7. ‘Surface’ as an Expression of an Intention – On Richard Wollheim’s Conception of Art as a Form of Life
Gabriele M. Mras
8. Richard Wollheim on Seeing-In: From Representational Seeing to Imagination
Richard Heinrich
Part IV Rescuing Wollheim’s Account without the Support of Wittgenstein
9. A measure of Kant seen in Wollheim
Gary Kemp
10. Seeing-In as Aspect Perception
Fabian Dorsch
Part V Imagination and Emotion in Wollheim’s Account of Pictorial Experience
11. Wollheim: Emotion and its relation to art
Michael Levine
12. Visions: Wollheim and Walton on the Nature of Pictures
David Hills