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Research Interests
I am interested in the relation between meaning and imagination.
In particular, I am researching the role the imagination plays in our
practical experience and knowledge of, and our talk about, the world.
I argue for a position that owes, broadly speaking,
to two major philosophical influences:
the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant;
and the twentieth century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
On this view, our experience of the world, and the
knowledge that is derived from it, is synthesised from sensation
and objective concepts. Imagination is critical for the correct
application of objective concepts to the stream of sensation.
I extend and refine these claims to argue that the imagination
confers meaning on our perceptions and actions, and therefore
on our practical experience of the world. In a nutshell, imagination
permeates our experience of the world rendering it meaningful,
and colours our knowledge of it.
In particular, meaningful experience requires two complementary
imaginative capacities.
Suppositional imagination is
essentially symbolic in nature, and provides form or structure
to our thought, by underwriting our possession of objective
concepts. Sensuous imagination re-creates sensory experiences,
is derived from our conscious experience of the world, and
enables us to imagine what certain experiences are like. The
Kantian point is that meaningful experience requires the capacity
to imagine correctly, and this requires the complementary
interplay of both suppositional and sensuous imagination.
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Publications
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Doctoral Thesis
University
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Oxford
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Dates
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Submitted April 2007, Examined February 2008
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Subject
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Philosophy of Mind, Language and Knowledge
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Title
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Meaning and Imagination
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Summary
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The thesis plots the conceptual connections between
three important topics in contemporary philosophy of learning:
Jackson's
knowledge argument, Wittgenstein's
rule-following considerations
and Ryle's alleged distinction between knowing how and
knowing that.
I argue that all three trade on a distinction between
between practical and theoretical knowledge. These two
forms of knowledge are to be understood in terms of
two complementary imaginative capacities. Theoretical
knowledge is explicated in terms of suppositional imagination.
Practical knowlege is explicated in terms of sensuous,
imaginative capacities acquired in practical experience.
Together, these two imaginative capacities confer meaning
on our thought, talk and action; and as such ground
our knowledge of the world.
I conclude that a unifying framework in theoretical philosophy,
which addresses
all three topics, can be built from the concept of imagining
experiences correctly.
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Main Supervisors
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Professor Bill Child and Professor Susan Hurley
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Examiners
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Professor Simon Blackburn and Professor Martin Davies
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Examiners' Statement
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"Phillip Joyce has submitted a dissertation of
a high international standard. It is far-ranging, lucid,
intelligent, and displays considerable judgement."
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