Research library

Imaginary Presence—Merleau-Ponty and Mental Imagery

Deery · Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

This philosophy paper asks how Merleau-Ponty's ideas would explain the perception-like feel of mental images. It argues that neither the view of images as perceptual representations nor the view of them as simulations explains that feel, and proposes instead that imagining something means partly taking up the bodily stance one would have if it were really there, bringing a vague sense of how it could look. In a footnote, the author suggests that people with aphantasia keep this capacity for perception but cannot use it on purpose to make absent things appear, while calling aphantasia beyond the paper's scope.