FABIAN DORSCH ESA ESSAY PRIZE

Perhaps the central theme of Fabian’s published output is the imagination. That was the topic of his doctoral dissertation (2008), and a subsequent book The Unity of Imagination (De Gruyter: 2012). Fabian’s offers a single account of all imagining, the Agency Account, and defends it against two main rivals, the Epistemological and Dependence Accounts. According to the Agency Account, the varieties of imagining, such as daydreaming, visualizing or supposing, essentially involve mental action, that is, the voluntary formation of mental representations. Distinguishing these different types of imagination both from each other and from other mental attitudes, Fabian describes how imagination contributes to and collaborates with perception, memory and judgment. In a series of important articles, he extends and adapts his position to accommodate other phenomena, such as pictorial representation, our emotional responses to fictions, and perceptual memory. Much of this material was to be integrated in a new book, Imagination (Routledge: forthcoming).

Fabian’s project on imagination makes central the epistemic relevance of imagination, its subjection to reasons, norms and values. In recent years, normativity, together with imagination, was increasingly the focus of his philosophical interest. He was in particular concerned with the relationship between experience and reason. Fabian articulated a position he called Phenomenal Rationalism, giving the phenomenal character of various mental states and episodes a central role in their epistemological import. Thus, for instance, perceptions, unlike imaginings, present their objects as external and as determining the representation itself, but, unlike judgements, are not sensitive to reasons. Phenomenal differences reflect differences in the mode of determination of the states and their epistemic role.