Imagination, Fiction, and Philosophy

Join UCSD Philosophy professors Jonathan Cohen and Matthew Fulkerson, and special guest Philosophy Professor Amy Kind from Claremont McKenna College for a fascinating panel discussion about the puzzles, possibilities, and limitations of our imagination.

On the one hand, we can easily imagine all kinds of things that are
false in our own world:

Once upon a time there was a society where there were no men.
Once upon a time there was a world in which the sky was red.

But we cannot imagine just anything. In particular, it appears far more
difficult to imagine that morally bad things are morally good (or vice
versa):

Once upon a time there was a society in which generosity and kindness
were morally bad.

Why, then, does imagination resist with moral violations, when it is
so flexible about factual violations? What is going on here? And what
does this tell us about how imagination works, and how it is related
to other mental capacities?

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Food and drink available for purchase from Zanzibar at The Loft