UNC-KCL Philosophy Conference 2015 on Imagination

The 2015 UNC-KCL Conference is on the topic of imagination, broadly construed. Imagination seems to be central to several crucial issues in philosophy. Prominently, much of contemporary analytic philosophy depends for its argumentation on thought experiments and counterfactual scenarios. But both thought experiments and counterfactuals seem to depend on the faculty of imagination (if it is a faculty) in an important way. When we can imagine scenarios, we say that they are possible; when we cannot imagine them, we say that they are impossible. But why think that imagination is so strongly connected to possibility and necessity? In addition, the use of thought experiments in ethical and political thinking seems to depend heavily on imagination. Theorists often ask their readers to imagine what they would do in a given scenario, and then use those intuitions to further their argument.