This post is by Dorothea Debus (pictured below), who is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. Her research is on topics in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology. At present, I am thinking about our ability to 'engage in future-directed mental time travel', that is, our ability to imagine future events. More specifically, I am interested in cases in which we imagine future events in a vivid, experiential way. For example, try to imagine what you are going to do this coming Sunday. Chances are that when you really try to do this, you will have some vivid imaginary experiences of the things you might hope to do, and the situations you might hope to encounter. Clearly, such experiential, or 'sensory', imaginations of future events have a characteristic temporal orientation - that is, they are directed towards the future , rather than the past or the present. In an attempt to account for this feature, I show that the context in which r...
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