ABSTRACT
Imagine for a moment that you are Napoleon; that is, imagine being Napoleon. You are looking out on the desolation of Austerlitz, tucking your right hand into your tunic, wondering whether or not to declare your brother King of Spain. (If Napoleon is too distant or unfamiliar a figure, pick another.) The main issue philosophers have discussed under the rubric “imagination and the self” concerns this sort of imaginative exercise: imagining oneself to be another. Imaginings of this sort were taken up by Bernard Williams in his paper “Imagination and the
Self” (Williams 1973). Williams took such imaginings – or our manner of describing them – to raise something of a puzzle. It seems unproblematic for me to imagine that I am Napoleon; asked to do this, I know roughly how to comply. (Contrast this with the instruction to imagine that someone else – Abraham Lincoln, say – is Napoleon; here it is much less clear how to proceed.) But if imagining is a guide to possibility, my imagining may lead me to a further, more metaphysical thought: the thought that I could have been Napoleon. And it is this that Williams finds puzzling: “I do not understand, and could not possibly understand, what it would be for me to have been Napoleon” (Williams 1973, 45). How could I (or Williams or anyone other than Napoleon) have been Napoleon? Surely only Napoleon could have been Napoleon. In Section 2, I examine Williams’s puzzle in more detail. Section 3 then considers the
dominant response to the puzzle found in the literature, which is to deny that an imagining that I would report by saying, “I am Napoleon” – a Napoleonic imagining, for short – is an imagining whose content is the proposition that I am Napoleon. Section 4 takes up a variation on this response, one couched in terms of the property theory of de se attitudes (see Lewis 1979). In Section 5, I discuss Lakoff cases, another puzzling class of imaginings (and a class not much discussed in the literature emerging out of Williams’s article). Finally, I close in Section 6 with a brief discussion of two further issues, one concerning the relationship between Napoleonic imaginings and mental imagery, another concerning temporal aspects of imagination.
