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Empathic perspective taking involves a phenomenally rich reaction to another's mental state, in an attempt to understand the other by feeling with them. But can we take just any perspective, even if the person we aim to understand seems fundamentally different from us? In this paper, we will explore the possibility of empathically understanding others that are different from us with respect to one aspect of their mental life: their sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that we should distinguish two different kinds of imaginative vividness: vividness of mental images and vividness of imaginative experiences. Philosophy has focussed on mental images, but distinguishing more complex vivid imaginative experiences from vivid mental images can help us understand our intuitions concerning the notion as well as the explanatory power of vividness. In particular, it can help us understand the epistemic role imagination can play on the one hand and our emotional engagement with literary fiction on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a crucial skill needed to empathize with others cannot be trained by reading fiction: the skill of reading the evidence for the other person's state of mind and, thus, empathically getting their mental state right. While the evidence for a fictional character's mental state is merely propositional, the evidence for a person's mental state in a typical real-life situation is often experiential. Because the kind of evidence is different, the skill does not carry over. If reading fiction has a positive impact on our empathic skills in real life, as some empirical evidence suggests, it cannot be because we practice the relevant skill in the context of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I first develop desiderata for an ontology of intuitions on the basis of paradigmatic cases of intuitions in philosophy. A special focus lies on cases that have been subject to extensive first-order philosophical debates but have been receiving little attention in the current debate over the ontology of intuitions. I show that none of the popular accounts in the current debate can meet all desiderata. I discuss a view according to which intuitions reduce to beliefs, Timothy Williamson's (2004, 2007) account of intuitions as beliefs or inclinations to believe, and traditional rationalist accounts of intuitions. I then show that a widely ignored account of intuitions as appearance states can meet the desiderata best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]