I am Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Cincinnati.  Most of my work falls within the philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and experimental psychology.  While I mainly write philosophy papers, some of my reserach involves designing and carrying out psychological experiments.
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My research considers questions such as:

• What is imagination?
• How does imagination help us do things like pretend, reason hypothetically, enjoy fiction, and be creative?
• What is "inner speech," and what does it allow us to do?
• What is the relationship of imagination to episodic memory?
• What are abstract concepts?
• What is the relationship between language and abstract thought? 
• How do we know our own minds?

My book, Explaining Imagination, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2020.  It's available free as a PDF download, thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati.  It's also available in hardcopy at the usual places.  You can find out more about the book--and reactions to it--on this site's Explaining Imagination page.

I was recently interviewed about my work on the Futurati Podcast. 

Contact: Langland-Hassan at uc dot edu

Upcoming and Recent Events:

October 19-21, 2023: "In Search of Imaginationland," Imagination Workshop, Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, University of San Diego, California.  

May 15-17, 2023: Imagiantion, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence, invited talk at Imagination and Creativity Conference, Geneva, Switzerland.
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April 3-5, 2023: Explaining Imagination, Author meets critics session at Pacific APA, Sanfrancisco, CA.

November 17, 2022:  "Knowing What You are Imagining,"  invited talk at Successful and Unsuccessful Remembering and Imagining, (online).

August 3-5, 2022:  Invited talk at Issues in Philosophy of Memory 3, Duke University, NC.

July 15-16, 2022:  "Episodic Memory and the Threat of Collapse," invited talk at Simulationism 2022, Center for the Philosophy of Memory, Universite Grenoble Alps, Grenoble, France.  

July 13, 2022:  Workshop on Reductive Theories of Imagination, and Explaining Imagination, University of Salzburg, Austria.  Invited talk:  "Compatibilism about Imagination"

June 15-16, 2022: "Thought Insertion as a Persecutory Delusion," invited talk at Deluded by Experience workshop, University of Birmingham, England.

May 24, 2022: Comments on Reza Hadisi's: “Between the Universal and the Particular: Lessons from Suhrawardi," Online at COVID Imagination Workshop, Claremont McKenna College, CA.

April 21, 2022:  "The Imagery Debate:  Still Debatable,"  invited talk at Imagistic Cognition Workshop, University of Salzburg, Austria (online).

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Peter Langland-Hassan

Here is how I pronounce my name