Imagination: Intentional & Involuntary w/ Dr. Tamar Gendler

In this episode, we look into how we can learn from intentionally guiding our imagination while also looking into how much of the imagination operates outside of our conscious control. We also continue to explore the limits of imagination and how it can be used for both good and ill. Our guest scholar in this episode is Dr. Tamar Gendler, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University.

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Dr. Tamar Szabó Gendler is Yale’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science. She holds a BA summa cum laude with Distinction in Humanities and in Mathematics-&-Philosophy from Yale University (1987) and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University (1996). After teaching at Syracuse and Cornell Universities for nearly a decade, she returned to Yale in 2006 as Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Cognitive Science Program. In 2009-10, supported by the Mellon Foundation’s New Directions program, she spent a year as a full-time student at Yale doing coursework in psychology, neuroscience, and statistics. In 2010, she was appointed Chair of the Yale philosophy department, becoming the first woman chair in the department’s two-century history. In 2013, she was appointed Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives, a position she held until she assumed her current role in 2014. As FAS Dean, Gendler has focused on building excellence and collaboration within and across traditional disciplinary boundaries throughout the divisions in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and across the university more broadly.

Gendler’s academic research brings together the techniques of traditional Anglo-American philosophy with empirical work from psychology and other social sciences; her interests include the relation between imagination and belief, the contrast between rational and non-rational persuasion, and the role of habits in shaping behavior and judgment. Many of these issues are explored in her Open Yale course, Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature. She also has interests in education policy and practice, and worked for several years after she graduated from Yale as an education policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.

Gendler is the author of Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology (Oxford, 2013), Thought Experiments: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases (Routledge, 2000), and co-editor of The Elements of Philosophy (Oxford 2008), Perceptual Experience (Oxford, 2006), Conceivability and Possibility (Oxford 2002), and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology (Oxford 2016).

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While her full catalog of articles and books is far too long to list here, the publications below provide a useful introduction to her scholarship addressing the topic of imagination:

Gendler, T. S. (2014). Thought experiment: On the powers and limits of imaginary cases. Routledge.

Gendler, T. S. (2000). The puzzle of imaginative resistance. The Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), 55-81.

Gendler, T. S., & Hawthorne, J. (Eds.). (2002). Conceivability and possibility. Clarendon Press.

Liao, S. Y., & Gendler, T. (2019). Imagination. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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The Social Science for Public Good Podcast is a project of the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance and VT Publishing intended to make social science theories accessible and available to individuals and organizations seeking to promote social change.

Music: purple-plane