The theme for the 2024 Essay Prize was “Imagination”. What was it about this particular topic that inspired you?
We had been thinking about the imagination within the context of a wider project of ours on the aesthetic experience of the extraordinary and remarkable. One aspect of this is to understand uncanny and other spooky experiences, especially within a broadly naturalistic worldview (hence, our running example in the essay of the experience of walking through a graveyard). We want to provide an account of how such experiences can be had without having to have a belief that the actual world is supernatural. Our view is that imagining various explanations for the things we encounter, whilst believing that those are not the actual explanations, is part of what characterises such experiences.
Your winning essay was entitled “Overactive (and Underactive) Imagination”. What does it mean for imagination to be overactive, or underactive?
According to us, it is possible to understand someone’s refusal to walk through a graveyard as an unwillingness to engage in a certain imaginative enterprise (rather than as revealing some underlying belief in the supernatural, or whatever). If this unwillingness gets in the way of something which is important – such as missing the train because of the refusal to take the short-cut through the graveyard to the train station – then it is a case of having an overactive imagination. Our use differs from a common use of ‘overactive imagination’ in that a person need not be confused over the distinction between what they imagine about the world and how the world is. Underactive imagination arises when one’s unwillingness to engage in a certain imaginative enterprise leaves one insensitive to some of the worthwhile experiences which the world affords – it leaves one in the position of being a humourless bore, for instance, rather than as someone who is sensitive to, say, the remarkableness of lottery numbers coming out in the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or the statue of a murdered king falling (entirely accidentally) on his murderer (as in Aristotle’s example of King Mitys).
Another idea we use in the essay is that of the ‘modal properties’ of the world, or its points of commonality with other worlds that we might imagine. When imagination is underactive, we are being insensitive to these properties. But it’s also possible to attend to those properties when we should be attending to something else – that’s overactive imagination.
You are co-authors: what made you choose to work together on this project, and how do you negotiate the collaborative process?
We have been writing together and collaborating on various projects for about 15 years. For instance, we published our first book together (Time in Fiction, Oxford University Press) in 2016. Unlike how others might co-author work, with each person taking responsibility for certain bits, writing separately, and then coming together to piece the contributions together, the way we work is more integrated throughout. All elements of the design, argument, drafting, execution and editing involve each of us equally. We literally sit next to each other and agree each sentence together! Since we’re married, we’re lucky to be able to do philosophy whenever we’re together, whether in the car, or making dinner, or whatever. It works because we are more or less aligned in what we find philosophically interesting and can draw on common points of reference in thinking about how to approach an issue. We have the same philosophical heroes, for instance. We’re also not at all precious about our individual contributions – in fact, there comes a point quite early on in the process when it doesn’t make any sense to think that the idea belongs to one but not the other of us. So we just happily (for the most part!) fight it out between us to arrive at what we think is the best position. It’s certainly something which we would recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to do it. It makes the work much better, and more enjoyable.
Would you encourage others to enter the Philosophy Essay Prize? What were the best things about the competition, all the way from writing your essay to being chosen as the winners?
We would encourage anyone who has an interest in a topic to take those opportunities to publish their ideas when those opportunities arise, whether that is an essay competition or a call for papers on a specific topic. There is a lot to be said for publishing in places where you know others with similar interests will look. It’s the ideas which matter, so finding a way of making others who have similar interests to you aware of your work is a good thing. The Philosophy Essay Prize also gives us an opportunity to share our work with a wider audience of readers who are interested in the topic, not just readers who are working within philosophy themselves. As the prize has a different theme each year, we would definitely encourage others to keep an eye on this competition, and look out for a theme that aligns with their research and with what is especially interesting to them.
What are you working on at the moment?
As noted earlier, our big project at the moment is writing a book on the aesthetic experience of the extraordinary. The key element of the account is the notion of a quasi-miracle, a notion first introduced by David Lewis to solve a technical problem he had with his theory of counterfactuals. We develop the notion for quite different purposes. Lewis says that a quasi-miracle is something that ‘happen[s] to simulate the traces which would have been left by quite a different process’ (David Lewis (1986, p.60) ‘Postscripts to “Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow”’, in David Lewis, Philosophical Papers Volume II (Oxford University Press, 1986), 52-66.) For instance, if a monkey tapping a keyboard at random happens to produce a string of characters which we recognise as words composing a ‘dissertation on the varieties of anti-realism’ (60), this is quasi-miraculous. Expanding from Lewis’s example, we say that something is experienced as quasi-miraculous when we recognise it as something that would be explained by a process other than the one that does explain it. In the case of the typing monkey, then, the event is remarkable not because we now think that perhaps the monkey actually planned a dissertation, but precisely because it did by chance something that would also have been explained if it had planned it.
This lets us take the idea of a quasi-miracle beyond the debate about counterfactuals where it originated, and show how useful it can be in other areas, such as aesthetics. It allows us to articulate what is involved in appreciating certain things as extraordinary and remarkable. Some things are seen as being suited to explanations other than the ones we believe they actually have. We think the ability to see things in this way is an important human capacity. When we do recognise aspects of the world in this way, it moves or excites us somehow; we might find it interesting, amusing, unsettling, surprising, or otherwise affecting. Once you frame our experience of the world in these terms, you can see quasi-miracles all over the place – in the arts, in mathematics, in the sciences, and in various kinds of everyday experience – and our book incorporates a range of philosophically interesting instances of them.
For more information about Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne, see their website: bournecaddickbourne.com
The 2025 Philosophy Essay Prize is open for entries, with the theme “Bodies”. The closing date is 30 November 2025. Read more about the 2025 Prize and how to enter