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Dear fellow list members,

Perhaps it is just me, but I sensed from recent remarks that there has been
a certain scarcity of discussion on this list of late.  I only just
returned to it after a six month hiatus, during which I mustered a vain
attempt to get my e-mail house in order.  Now, that it is relatively free
of backlog, I thought I might be so bold as to jump in and offer a
potential topic for discussion that takes the form, I am afraid, of a
reader's poll. 

I wondered if folks would be kind enough to share with me
their intuitions on an issue that has been discussed on this list before,
namely the idea of "imagined seeing".  I have been thinking about the
possibility of imagined seeing for some time, and although I am pretty sure
that our filmgoing experiences probably do not involve anything that can be
adequately described by this term, I remain curious over an issue that was
well brought out in Samuel Guttenplan's review of _Film Theory and
Philosophy_ and which figures prominently in contemporary debates in
analytic philosophy of film: can we imagine that we see x without imagining
anything about ourselves and our relation to x? (e.g. does imagining seeing
Mt. Rushmore involve imagining that "I see Mt. Rushmore" or that " I am in
South Dakota" or, more simply, that "The sculpture is seen
from the foot of the mountain?") 
 
Should we perhaps coin another term such as "visual
imaginings" that can refer the imagination of the physical appearance of
something without any reference at all to an observer? Would such an act of
imagination be possible?

I guess providing a detailed answer to this question would require the
posting of doctoral theses, and this I do not encourage.  I am interested
in intuitions on this, however, especially since my advisor and mine differ
somewhat on this question.

Thanks in advance,

Karen Bardsley
Montreal, Canada 

P.S.  If this issue has been done to death in my absence, kindly disregard
this missive.



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