The ICARUS seminar (Imagination, Creativity, Affect, Reverie, Utopia, Senses) will focus on the interdisciplinary study of the boundary line that separates, for our minds, reality from everything that transcends it. By bringing together philosophy and the cognitive sciences, we will explore the capacities and states (notably imagination and dreaming) that enable us to re-elaborate sensory and affective data and to apprehend the world from new perpectives, even from other worlds or utopias. Drawn into its wanderings and reveries, the mind is capable of producing ideas or objects deemed novel and valuable, in other words, of pispaying creativity. But how far can we take this power that we have received as a species (and perhaps not just us, human beings) ? It is advisable not to fly too close to the sun.

Venue : Varies according to session, details below

Schedule : Monday, 2-4pm (unless otherwise specified)

Contacts : Margherita Arcangeli, Jérôme Dokic

 Next sessions

Julia Langkau (Université de Genève)

"Self-Knowledge from Literary Fiction"

March 16, 2026 (2pm-4pm), Jean Nicod’s meeting room (29 rue d’Ulm)

Intuitively, literary fiction provides a source of self-knowledge, as it can reveal our evaluative and affective dispositions. This paper argues that, while self-knowledge from literary fiction can be gained through experiential imagination, such engagement is characterized by a significant degree of imaginative freedom. This freedom renders experiential responses epistemically fragile, because what they track depends, among other things, on salience. The paper identifies two distinct problems arising from this salience-sensitivity Lolita Problem, in which fiction-dependent salience can lead to misattribution, and the Salience Problem, in which reader-dependent salience can lead to underdetermination. The paper proposes that genuine self-knowledge from literary fiction requires object-tracking as well as coherence with one’s broader self-understanding.

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Steve Humbert-Droz (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

"Smart creativity"

March 30, 2026 (2pm-4pm), Jean Nicod’s meeting room (29 rue d’Ulm)

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Mike Stuart (University of York)

"Artificial Intelligence as paintbrush, garden, canvas, telescope, companion and hammer : Making sense of metaphors of AI as atool for scientific imagination"

April 13, 2026 (10am-12pm exceptionally), Jean Nicod’s meeting room (29 rue d’Ulm)

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Mathias Thaler (University of Edinburgh)

"Acting Otherwise in the Face of Ecological Collapse"

June 1, 2026 (2pm-4pm), Jean Nicod’s meeting room (29 rue d’Ulm)

Pervasive patterns of inaction in the face of ecological collapse affect all aspects of domestic and international politics today. This paper argues that dominant responses to this kind of dithering, like ruptural transformation and accommodationist adaptation, fail to tackle the underlying problem – disavowing the actual gravity of the escalating crisis. To address this shortcoming, I turn to Günther Anders’s concept of “apocalypse indifference”. Based on a detailed reading of this underappreciated author, I defend what I call the “political logic of infinite delay”, which recognizes that decisive action is required to respond to the climate emergency, without, however, embracing the idea that ecological collapse can be completely avoided. Anders’s “prophylactic apocalypticism” relies on the cultivation of a specific type of fear to effectively combat denialism. The paper concludes by illustrating this instructive process through the recent use of die-ins and funeral rites by environmental protest movements.

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Mathias Thaler (University of Edinburgh)

"Estrangement on a Strange Planet"

June 8, 2026 (2pm-4pm), Jean Nicod’s meeting room (29 rue d’Ulm)

In this lecture, I will explore the ways in which the Anthropocene affects one of the key functions of narrative art : the production of estrangement. Elaborating on Eva Horn’s work (2020), I show that, on a climate-changed planet, latency (“slow violence”), then entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds, and a clash of spatial and temporal scales pose new formal challenges to the repertoire of literature (and other artforms). These challenges are instructive beyond literary studies insofar as they also concern the emancipatory impact that experiences of estrangement are supposed to exert on readers and spectators, allowing them to see their ordinary habits from unexpected angles and thereby enabling them to transform their lifeworlds. Since, as Svetlana Boym reminds us (2019), defamiliarization has both an aesthetic and a political dimension, what role should it play on a planet that is already so strange that we are now not only facing various problems of collective action, but also a veritable crisis of imagination ? My argument will be that, if estrangement devices are to occupy a central role in the aesthetics and politics of the Anthropocene, they need to become attuned to its specific nature. And that is, unsurprisingly, a difficult endeavour, which partly explains why it is so hard to undo the currently dominant social imaginaries : business as usual, solutionist techno-fixes and apocalyptic fatalism.

 Previous sessions

Uku Tooming (University of Tartu)

"On the possibility of imagining one’s death"

February 16, 2026 (2pm-4pm), Institut Jean Nicod meeting room (29, rue d’Ulm)

This talk analyzes the resistance that arises when agents attempt to imagine their own death. While philosophical aesthetics has long discussed imaginative resistance, our reluctance or inability to imagine certain propositions as true within fiction, a structurally comparable form of resistance appears in trying to imagine one’s death. I argue that the latter constitutes a “reverse” form of imaginative resistance : in imagining our own death we resist treating imagined propositions as actual and treat them as fictional instead. This account helps make sense of meaningful reflection on death and the role imagination plays in philosophical evaluations of death’s harm. In the talk, I will proceed, first, by comparing and contrasting standard imaginative resistance and the resistance to imagining one’s death, second, by examining the state of treating oneself as fictional, and third, by considering some benefits of fictionalizing one’s dead self.

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Takuya Niikawa (Kobe University)

"Mood and Atmosphere"

October 13 (2pm-4pm), room 1, Amyot campus (3 rue Amyot)

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Margherita Arcangeli (IJN, EHESS) et Jérôme Dokic (IJN, EHESS)

"ICARUS elements and their relationships"

October 20 (2pm-4pm), Amyot campus room 1 (3 rue Amyot)

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Jérôme Dokic (IJN, EHESS) & Brigitte d’Andrea-Novel (Centre for Robotics, Mines ParisTech, coordinator of the PSL program ATIPICC)

"Presence in Real and Virtual Worlds"

November 10 (2pm-4pm, exceptionally in salle Ribot, 29 rue d’Ulm - joint session with the "Art and Cognition" seminar)

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Maria Chiara Medri (Università La Sapienza)

"The Sublime Genius : Imagination And Emotion In The Artistic Creative Process"

November 17 (2pm-4pm), Amyot campus room 1 (3, rue Amyot)

This presentation investigates the role of the sublime in the creation of artwork, shifting the focus from the aesthetic experience of the viewer to the subjective experience of the creative subject : the genius. In contrast to both the traditional notion of the natural sublime and contemporary approaches emphasizing reception aesthetics, this contribution centres on the creative moment itself, interrogating the mental, imaginative, and emotional processes behind artistic production. Drawing on modern theories of the sublime—especially those by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, whose thought established the link between art and beauty and opposing the artistic sublime—this proposal argues that the sublime experience, in both its emotional aspects (awe, exaltation, terror, admiration) and its rational structure (awareness of limits, striving for the infinite), can organize the genius’s artistic creative experience. Within this framework, the genius is not merely a producer of exceptional works but one inhabiting an inner dynamic shaped by the interplay of reason, imagination, unrepresentable, and excess—all hallmarks of the sublime. This perspective frames artistic creation as a delicate balance between imagination and emotion, and between the sign as that which traces form and constitutes the boundary of the infinite. The presentation aims to propose a theoretical model redefining inspiration through a cognitive-affective lens and applies it to selected examples from contemporary art, starting in the mid-twentieth century.

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Margherita Arcangeli (IJN, EHESS) & Cyril de Gasperis (film director, screenwriter and producer)

"Aphantasia & creativity"

December 1 (2pm-4pm, exceptionally in salle Ribot, 29 rue d’Ulm - joint session with the "Art and Cognition" seminar)

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Julie Torres (Université de Bourgogne, LEAD)

"L’aphantasie et l’imagerie tactile"

December 15 (2pm-4pm), room 1, Amyot campus (3, rue Amyot)

This presentation examines the impact of aphantasia on multisensory aesthetic experience, with a particular focus on the tactile modality. Although imagery is most studied in the visual domain, tactile imagery plays a crucial role when direct exploration is not possible. Drawing on a study comparing aphantasic individuals to a control group, I will show how aphantasia affects not only visual imagery but also tactile imagery. These differences are associated with lower "Openness to Experience" and reduced hedonic evaluations in situations where the multisensory experience is incomplete. Aphantasia thus provides a valuable framework for understanding the role of mental simulation in aesthetic processing and multisensory cognition.

Simona Chiodo (PoliMI)

"What AI “art” can teach us about art"

03 June 2024, from 10am to 12pm exceptionally 

Ces dernières années, l’utilisation des mots « AI art », c’est-à-dire l’art produit par l’intelligence artificielle, a augmenté de façon exponentielle. Parfois, ils ont été utilisés sans conscience philosophique, du discours public à la littérature strictement technologique. Parfois, ils ont commencé à entrer dans le débat philosophique, de la philosophie de la technologie à la philosophie de l’art. Je réfléchirai à l’art de l’IA en combinant mon expertise en philosophie de la technologie et en philosophie de l’art, ce qui a caractérisé mon travail de philosophe au fil des ans. Plus précisément, je réfléchirai à l’art de l’IA comme une opportunité de remettre en question davantage ce que nous entendons lorsque nous utilisons le mot « art ». Tout d’abord, je préciserai quel type d’art de l’IA je considère. Deuxièmement, j’analyserai la raison la plus importante pour laquelle les artefacts de l’IA sont définis comme de l’art. Enfin, j’utiliserai des expériences de pensée pour affirmer que les artefacts de l’IA ne peuvent pas être définis comme de l’art, et je conclurai en me demandant ce que l’utilisation des mots « art de l’IA » peut nous montrer à la fois sur l’art et sur notre ère technologique.

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Peter Hacker (St John’s College - Oxford, UCL)

"On Dreams and dreaming"

22 avril 2024

The expression ’to dream’ and its cognates are examined, and different senses distinguished. Global dream scepticism is rejected. Cartesian dream scepticism is examined and Descartes’s refutation of it is found faulty. Nevertheless the idea that we cannot know whether we are dreaming or waking is repudiated.

Scepticism about dreaming, however, is far more interesting. It raises doubts about whether we ever dream. Is what we call ’dreaming’ not merely a post-sleep mnemonic hallucination ? This idea is explored. It is argued that this is an alternative form of representation. It is not false, but it is not our form of representation. The conclusion defended is that the contention that dreams occur during sleep is not itself an empirical claim. It is in fact a convention of representation, for which a commonly unexamined price is paid.

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Session cancelled

Mike T. Stuart (University of Leeds)

"In terms of imagination, science is bad comedy improv"

25 March 2024

There is no particular scientific method. If we could form a government to rule science, it should be anarchist, not democratic. Science does not produce objective statements of fact, but stories whose value depends on the audience. These claims earned Paul Feyerabend the title “the worst enemy of science.” Academics and elites responded mostly with continued support for a policy of dogmatism : if we can just force everyone to believe in the objectivity of science, everything will be fine. But the benefits of this strategy for science and society are dubious. In this talk, I recommend we reconsider a theme from Feyerabend’s later work : looking at the epistemology of art as a toolbox for the epistemology of science. Feyerabend argued that science deals in stories, and that representations are “theatrical.” So, what makes a good story ? What should their genre be ? What makes good theatre ? What is the proper role for humour and emotion in science ? Pointing the way forward, I show that Feyerabend’s answers all revolve around the imagination, whose sanctity and freedom he relentlessly defended. To move forward, I first identify the many kinds and uses of imagination that have been proposed since Feyerabend, and then use these to inform an account of creative scientific problem-solving at the cutting edge of science which portrays it as (being like) (comedy) improv. I close by considering the epistemological and ethical consequences of such a view.

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Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala)

"What Do We Owe Beautiful Objects – A Case for Aesthetic Obligation"

11 March 2024, exceptionally from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

This paper has two main aims. The first is to examine our normative relations to artworks and cultural artefacts where these are threatened by damage or destruction. The second aim is to develop an argument for the notion of aesthetic obligation, offering an alternative model of explanation of such relations which relies neither exclusively on the object of appreciation nor on the appreciating subject. Instead, an aesthetic obligation is held to be directed primarily towards the aesthetic community which appreciates the object of appreciation for its aesthetic value. What unites the aesthetic community is that it values the object in question in virtue of its aesthetic character. As an aesthetic agent, I have an obligation towards that community to the extent that I have formed some kind of significant relationship with it, or sought membership of it.

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Thomas Andrillon (INSERM, ICM)

Dreams and daydreams : the porous boundaries between wakefulness and sleep

26 février 2024

Sleep and wakefulness are not mutually exclusive, all-or-nothing phenomena. Rather, both during sleep and wakefulness, regional brain activity can contrast with the global state of an individual. For example, individuals getting tired can show a pattern of brain activity reminiscent of sleep, in the form of low-frequency high-amplitude slow waves, while still behaviorally and physiologically awake. In wakefulness, these slow waves interfere with cognitive processes leading to impulsive responses or slow responses. Sleep-like slow waves have been paired with periods of neuronal silencing, which could explain their association with lapses of attention. These slow waves have also been associated with changes in subjective experience as they predict instances of mind wandering or even mind blanking. Here I will present a set of new studies that sought to better characterize these slow waves in wakefulness and their link with fluctuations of consciousness during the day.

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Mathias Thaler (University of Edinburgh)

"No Other Planet : Introduction and discussion"

12 février 2024 from 10am to 12pm exceptionally 

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. No Other Planet (CUP 2022) examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains : political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene ; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. No Other Planet juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

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Julia Langkau (Université de Genève)

"Creative Uses of Imagination"

29 janvier 2024

For most philosophers of creativity, a mental process is only creative if there is a creative product at the end of it. Noël Carroll and Jacob Bronowski have argued that an audience’s response to artworks can be creative in the sense that understanding the artwork means re-creating it. I will argue that we should understand creative processes independently of any kind of output, and that we should define the creative process through the role of the imagination. Berys Gaut and Michael Beaney have discussed different models concerning the role of imagination in creating : imagination could either display ideas, or search for ideas, or connect different ideas. I will argue that instead of thinking of different models of which only one can be correct, we should think of different functions the imagination can take in creative processes. Once we look at the role of imagination in terms of different functions, we can see that these functions are at work even in processes that don’t lead to an output.

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Margherita Arcangeli (EHESS, IJN)

"The Relationship(s) between Imagination and Creativity"

04 December 2023

Imagination and creativity seem so inextricably intertwined. This strong tie is entrenched in ordinary language and illustrious philosophical theories of the past. Yet, quite surprisingly, contemporary philosophers have paid little attention to it. A possible explanation lies in the received view according to which imagination is neither sufficient nor necessary for creativity. In this talk I build a bridge between the philosophy of creativity and the philosophy of imagination to show that an informed view on what creativity and imagination are is likely to change how we see their relationship, questioning the insufficiency/nonnecessity claim.

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Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter)

"Predictive Processing, Imagery and Imagination"

20 November 2023, salle Camille Marbo, from 10am to 12pm exceptionally 

Several of the most prominent proponents (Hohwy 2013, Clark 2016) of predictive processing claim that predictive processing is particularly well placed to explain imagination : it involves generating the predictive hypothesis in a decoupled manner by turning down the gain on prediction error. As we proposed in Jones and Wilkinson (2020), this conflates imagery and imagination. While predictive processing might be good at explaining imagery, imagery is not sufficient for imagination, nor, arguably, is it even necessary. In this seminar I present the many things that a predictive processing account would need to accommodate in order to properly give an account of imagination. What emerges is a view of imagination that is both adverbialist (an organism is imagining if and only if they are doing something imaginatively) and enculturated (extended creative practices give rise to imagination and not vice versa).

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Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter)

"Predictive Processing and Psychosis" 

13 November 2023, salle Ferdinand Berthier

One of the many appealing things about predictive processing is that it represents a point of convergence between several disciplines working independently, including embodied philosophy of cognitive science, neural networks and machine learning, as well as biological psychiatry. In this seminar, I present the different ways in which predictive processing, and, in particular, the hypothesized role of dopamine in “precision-weighting”, has been used to explain psychosis. In this context it has been used to explain delusions and hallucinations, but the standard way of accounting for these has problems and limitations. A recent development that we have proposed (in Rappe and Wilkinson 2022) overcomes these.

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Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter)

"Introduction to Predictive Processing"

30 October 2023

The Predictive Processing Framework (Friston 2005, Clark 2013, Hohwy 2013) is an increasingly popular and revolutionary way of thinking about the brain and cognition. According to it, the brain’s main task is not to process inputs from the outside world, but to predict future activity at many hierarchical timescales. This boils down to the dictum, “All the brain ever does is minimize prediction error”. This framework has wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of perception, action, mental imagery, and many other things besides. In this seminar I introduce predictive processing, elucidate various different versions of it, and raise some potential concerns for it.

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Margherita Arcangeli & Jérôme Dokic

Introductory session

16 October 2023