ABSTRACT
The question as to whether collectives could have proper imaginary representations, their own mental imaginary, or even their own faculty of imagination is puzzling. On the one hand, “imagining together” seems to be a rather ordinary phenomenon; on the other hand, however, if we take imagination as to involve some sensory phenomenology mind, it seems difficult to understand how this could properly be shared. This chapter aims at developing a normative account of collective imagining that is able both to accommodate the typical sensory phenomenology of imagination and maintains the crucial differences between collective imagination and individual imagination. In conclusion, some desiderata for future research are introduced, which concern the particular status of those forms of collective imagining whose correlate are not ordinary objects or events, but precisely communities or collectives.
