Reid on Imagination page 1 of 26 Thinking About Different Nonexistents Of The Same Kind * Reid’s Account Of The Imagination And Its Nonexistent Objects Marina Folescu University of Missouri Abstract How is it that, as fiction readers, we are nonplussed by J. K. Rowling’s prescription to imagine Ronan, Bane, and Magorian, three different centaurs of the Forbidden Forrest at Hogwarts? It is usually held in the philosophical literature on fictional discourse that singular imaginings of fictional objects are impossible, given the blatant nonexistence of such objects. In this pa- per, I have a dual purpose: (i) on the one hand, to show that, without being committed to Meinongeanism, we can explain the phenomenon of singular imaginings of different nonex- istents of the same (fictional) kind; (ii) while, at the same time, to attribute this position to Thomas Reid, thus correcting some misunderstandings of his view on imagination. 1 Introduction As fiction readers we have no trouble thinking about different nonexistent objects, even when they are of the same (fictional) kind. However, if we put on our philosophy hat and want to explain how fictional discourse works, we are faced with a cluster of questions: (1) what are fictional * I would like to thank Jim Van Cleve, Gideon Yaffe, Ed McCann, and Alex Radulescu for helping shape this paper and for encouraging me to believe in tropes when it was starting to seem difficult to do so. I would also like to thank Peter Markie and Matthew McGrath for closely reading and commenting on previous versions of this paper. In 2010, some of the material discussed here was presented at the South Central Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, at Texas A & M University, and at the Atlantic Canada Seminar In Early Modern Philosophy, at Dalhousie University. I am grateful to the organizers – Stephen Daniel, Mike LeBuffe, and Tom Vinci, respectively – and to everyone in the audience for their suggestions, especially to Gregory A. Brown, Todd Buras, Geoffrey Gorham, Yitzhak Melamed, Andrew Roche, and Raffaella de Rosa.