The Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind online Seminar

We are pleased to invite you to the second session of the Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind online Seminar to be held on Wednesday, March 5th from 5 pm to 6:30 pm (CET) at the following link:
https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/j/92782580594?pwd=a5p3WfunQQxJICrjJaUenFJFzmllbx.1

We will welcome Mathilde Cappelli, doctoral student at the University of Geneva, for the following presentation :

“The enigmatic conative nature of fantasy”

This presentation aims to elucidate the nature of fantasy which has not been explored much in the philosophical literature and mostly in relation to imagination. In order to do so, I shall first distinguish fantasy from imagination by specifying the sort of pleasure centrally involved in fantasy. I shall then argue that the attitudes of desiring and fantasizing strongly interact with each other and that the nature of this interaction should be clarified, because if not one may be tempted to misleadingly assume that fantasizing necessarily involves desiring. This assumption is exposed to the following objection: in a nutshell, if (i) the pleasurable activity of fantasizing x necessarily involves desiring x, if (ii) desiring x is a source of displeasure when this desire is unsatisfied and if (iii) fantasizing x does not satisfy one's desire for x, then (iv) it seems difficult to account for the pleasure we take in fantasizing.