ABSTRACTIMAGINATION REDUX: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONBYIvan Guajardo The imagination has been enjoying an increase in popularity in recent years. Research on it now ranges from empirical studies of mental imagery to philosophical attempts to classify it. Although this research has generated valuable insights, most of it fails to pay sufficient attention to our intentional experience of imagination. As a result, misconceptions of imagination abound, and dimensions of our lived experience of it that are central to describe its nature adequately are often overlooked or treated very superficially. In what follows, I revisit the phenomenon of imagination and develop a better account of its intentional structure. On the basis of Husserl's writings, I will argue that imagination is a distinctive psychic act that differs from perception and memory in terms of its quasi-positional stance on objects, its freedom to alter pure possibilities at will, and in terms of how imagine objects relate to time. After developing a phenomenological description of these three essential differences, I describe three forms of imagination, and then use everything learned as the basis of an argument against pictorialism, an alternative theory that reduces imagination to a mere ability to form mental images. I will argue that, despite its influence, pictorialism misconceives what it is like to imagine something primarily by conflating the act of imagination with image-consciousness.
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