Imagining the Presence of the Real

Abstract Although it is far from uncharted territory, some contemporary thinkers have been pushing the idea that imagination plays a central role in perception; specifically, as that which explains the phenomenon of perceptual presence . I agree with this general idea. However, there is a tendency among thinkers to place the vague notion of mental imagery at the core of their understanding of what it is to imagine; and attempts to explain perceptual presence in imagistic terms are incompatible with the phenomenology. I will consider another view that attempts to explain perceptual presence in terms of our possession of a form of implicit bodily knowledge of the ways one can access the world. Although it does not encounter the same issues as the imagery view , I will argue that there is much more to the phenomenon of presence than can be accounted for on the access view . I will propose an alternative that can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty. This alternative involves both appeal to a form of bodily knowledge and an imaginative capacity for entertaining the possibility of being situated otherwise; that, when exercised, gives rise to the presence of objects in experience as the objects that they are.