Sartre on imaginative presence
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences November 5, 2025 Valerie Bernard
Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the feeling of phenomenal presence—the sense that what one experiences is actually there—accompanies only perception, not imagination or dreaming. This puts him against contemporary philosophers like Amy Kind, who holds that imagination provides a sense of “presence in absence,” and Jennifer Windt and Michael Barkasi, who claim that dreaming involves immersion in a spatiotemporal dreamscape. The paper explains how Sartre’s theory of perception shares key objectives with contemporary naïve realism, and that his rejection of imaginative presence is consistent with why a naïve realist would also reject it. It contrasts Sartre’s view of why a dreamer lacks true immersion with the views of Windt and Barkasi.