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Slugs and Steins with Assistant Professor E. Hande Tuna – You Can Imagine Dragons… But Not That Female Infanticide Is Good? The Puzzling Limits of Imagination
June 9 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm | Virtual Event
You can imagine flying on the back of a dragon. You can picture a talking rabbit solving crimes, or a world where time runs backward. So why is it so hard to imagine that slavery is morally good, or that killing your baby girl is the right thing to do? This talk explores a weird and wonderful puzzle in the philosophy of imagination known as imaginative resistance—the experience of hitting a mental wall when a story asks us to imagine not just impossible things, but morally alien things. Why do our moral beliefs seem to stick, even in fiction? If imagining is “just pretending,” why do some make-believe scenarios feel off-limits or even offensive? Through examples from literature and film, we’ll explore what this resistance reveals about how imagination works, and how deeply our values shape what we’re able or willing to imagine.
No background in philosophy is required. Just bring your imagination and maybe a little skepticism.
Emine Hande Tuna is a philosopher who spends her time thinking seriously about things that don’t exist—like square circles, guilt-free villains, and moral worlds where injustice is good. She’s an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, where she writes and teaches about imagination, aesthetics, and why some stories just won’t sit right with us. Her book on Kantian Art Criticism is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She’s also at work on a second book, Imaginative Resistance (under contract with Oxford University Press), which she’ll be developing next year as a Quinn Fellow at the National Humanities Center (a rare kind of fellowship—one that didn’t mysteriously disappear).
Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.