ABSTRACT
Often in our everyday lives, for instance, in decision-taking, empathizing with others, and engaging with fictions, we are able to imagine what a particular emotion feels like. This chapter analyzes the structure of these imaginings as a kind of experiential imagining. After introducing the topic, I argue first that these imaginings cannot be explained exclusively by their content and that a focus on the mode of imagining is required. We not only imagine having emotions, but we also imagine them experientially, and this means that we imagine feeling them. I proceed to analyze the content of such imaginings in terms of the phenomenal properties of emotions undergone from a particular subjective perspective within the imagined scenario. Next, I argue that the mode in which such emotions are experientially imagined requires other-oriented perspective-shifting and the recreation of an emotion-like state. In the final part, I examine how we recreate emotion-like states in two cases: when the emotion has been previously felt and when it has not been previously experienced. The main findings are summarized in the conclusion.
