Aphantasia can be a gift to philosophers and critics like me | Psyche Ideas

Aphantasia veils the past and the future from the mind’s eye. That can be a gift to philosophers like Derek Parfit and me

There’s an early memory from my childhood, representative of its peak happiness. I’m on a simple, iron child’s seat on my father’s bike. He’s just picked me up from kindergarten and is taking me home through the forest on the way to our house. It is a spectacularly fluorescent Danish spring, and we’re travelling through woodland illuminated, from above, by the light-green foliage of the tall beeches only just coming into soft leaves and, from below, by snow-white forest anemones spreading around us in dense, endless carpets. Bringing this scene to my mind, I don’t ‘see’ anything. I have…

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