[PDF] Knowledge Through Imagination eBook

Author : Amy Kind
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 45,62 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 019871680X

GET BOOK

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe. It provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. It enables creation of new things that the world has never seen. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? The ten original essays in Knowledge Through Imagination, along with a substantial introduction by the editors, grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Many of the essays proceed by considering specific domains of inquiry where imagination is often employed--from the navigation of our immediate environment, to the prediction of our own and other peoples' behavior, to the investigation of ethical truth. Other essays assess the prospects for knowledge through imagination from a more general perspective, looking at issues of cognitive architecture and basic rationality. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination.

Author : Gary Lachman
Publisher : Floris Books
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 33,72 MB
Release : 2017-10-19
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1782504575

GET BOOK

The ability to imagine is at the heart of what makes us human. Through our imagination we experience more fully the world both around us and within us. Imagination plays a key role in creativity and innovation. Until the seventeenth century, the human imagination was celebrated. Since then, with the emergence of science as the dominant worldview, imagination has been marginalised -- depicted as a way of escaping reality, rather than knowing it more profoundly -- and its significance to our humanity has been downplayed. Yet as we move further into the strange new dimensions of the twenty-first century, the need to regain this lost knowledge seems more necessary than ever before. This insightful and inspiring book argues that, for the sake of our future in the world, we must reclaim the ability to imagine and redress the balance of influence between imagination and science. Through the work of Owen Barfield, Goethe, Henry Corbin, Kathleen Raine, and others, and ranging from the teachings of ancient mystics to the latest developments in neuroscience, The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination draws us back to a philosophy and tradition that restores imagination to its rightful place, essential to our knowing reality to the full, and to our very humanity itself.

Author : Omedi Ochieng
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 36,39 MB
Release : 2018-06-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0268103321

GET BOOK

The Intellectual Imagination unfolds a sweeping vision of the form, meaning, and value of intellectual practice. The book breaks new ground in offering a comprehensive vision of the intellectual vocation. Omedi Ochieng argues that robust and rigorous thought about the form and contours of intellectual practices is best envisioned in light of a comprehensive critical contextual ontology—that is, a systematic account of the context, forms, and dimensions in and through which knowledge and aesthetic practices are created, embodied, translated, and learned. Such an ontology not only accounts for the embeddedness of intellectual practices in the deep structures of politics, economics, and culture, but also in turn demonstrates the constitutive power of critical inquiry. It is against this background that Ochieng unfolds a multidimensional and capacious theory of knowledge and aesthetics. In a critique of the oppositional binaries that now reign in the modern and postmodern academy—binaries that pit fact versus value, science versus the humanities, knowledge versus aesthetics—Ochieng argues for the inextricable intertwinement of reason, interpretation, and the imagination. The book offers a close and deep reading of North Atlantic and African philosophers, thereby illuminating the resonances and contrasts between diverse intellectual traditions. The upshot is an incisively rich, layered, and textured reading of the archetypal intellectual styles and aesthetic forms that have fired the imagination of intellectuals across the globe. Ochieng’s book is a radical summons to a practice and an imagination of the intellectual life as the realization of good societies and good lives.

Author : Christopher Badura
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 49,11 MB
Release : 2021-06-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1000399060

GET BOOK

This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. Chapters 6 and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Author : Amy Kind
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 503 pages
File Size : 31,16 MB
Release : 2016-01-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1317329457

GET BOOK

Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding Handbook contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the philosophy of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and ‘imaginative resistance’ Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art.

Author : Eugene Garver
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 37,13 MB
Release : 2018-10-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 022657556X

GET BOOK

Spinoza’s Ethics, and its project of proving ethical truths through the geometric method, have attracted and challenged readers for more than three hundred years. In Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination, Eugene Garver uses the imagination as a guiding thread to this work. Other readers have looked at the imagination to account for Spinoza’s understanding of politics and religion, but this is the first inquiry to see it as central to the Ethics as a whole—imagination as a quality to be cultivated, and not simply overcome. ​Spinoza initially presents imagination as an inadequate and confused way of thinking, always inferior to ideas that adequately represent things as they are. It would seem to follow that one ought to purge the mind of imaginative ideas and replace them with rational ideas as soon as possible, but as Garver shows, the Ethics don’t allow for this ultimate ethical act until one has cultivated a powerful imagination. This is, for Garver, “the cunning of imagination.” The simple plot of progress becomes, because of the imagination, a complex journey full of reversals and discoveries. For Garver, the “cunning” of the imagination resides in our ability to use imagination to rise above it.

Author : Rudolf Steiner
Publisher : Rudolf Steiner Press
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 30,23 MB
Release : 2019-04-25
Category : Imagination
ISBN : 1855845563

GET BOOK

Rudolf Steiner differentiated clearly between the spiritual concept of Imagination and our everyday understanding of the word. As living, pictorial thinking, Imagination is a primary aspect of the contemporary path of inner schooling – the first of three levels of initiate knowledge and cognition. Imagination leads us into a world of flowing, living pictures: a realm of soul and spirit in which everything is in continual movement. This anthology offers a survey of the diverse aspects of Imagination and imaginative cognition. As the thematically re-ordered texts reveal, Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual philosophy – anthroposophy – is itself often pictorial and imaginative in nature. Many of its fundamental concepts, such as the evolution of the world and the human being, were formulated by Steiner in vivid, living pictures. However, whilst imaginative perception leads us to the threshold of the spiritual world, we can also fall prey there to illusions, visions and hallucinations. This volume, expertly assembled by Edward de Boer, draws on the entirety of Rudolf Steiner’s collected works – from his earliest writings to passages from his many lectures. It is conceived as a stimulus to readers to practise, deepen and extend their own imaginative consciousness. Steiner’s commentary on ‘exemplary Imaginations’, in particular, encourages further study, contemplation and schooling of our own pictorial thinking. Chapters include ‘Imagination as Supersensible Cognition’; ‘The Rosicrucian Path of Schooling’; ‘Exercises to Develop Imagination’; ‘Understanding Imagination Through Inspiration and Intuition’; ‘Illusions, Hallucinations and Visions’; ‘Imaginative Perception as the Threshold to the Etheric World’; ‘Goethe’s Worldview’ and ‘Exemplary Imaginations’ (including commentary on ‘The Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’, The Mystery Plays; The Great Initiates; the ‘Apocalyptic Seals’; The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and the ‘Michael Imagination’).

Author : Luca Tateo
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 97 pages
File Size : 41,41 MB
Release : 2020-03-09
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 3030380254

GET BOOK

This is a book about imaginative work and its relationship with the construction of knowledge. It is fully acknowledged by epistemologists that imagination is not something opposed to rationality; it is not mere fantasy opposed to intellect. In philosophy and cognitive sciences, imagination is generally “delimiting not much more than the mental ability to interact cognitively with things that are not now present via the senses.” (Stuart, 2017, p. 11) For centuries, scholars and poets have wondered where this capability could come from, whether it is inspired by divinity or it is a peculiar feature of human mind (Tateo, 2017b). The omnipresence of imaginative work in both every day and highly specialized human activities requires a profoundly radical understanding of this phenomenon. We need to work imaginatively in order to achieve knowledge, thus imagination must be something more than a mere flight of fantasy. Considering different stories in the field of scientific endeavor, I will try to propose the idea that the imaginative process is fundamental higher mental function that concurs in our experiencing, knowing and understanding the world we are part of. This book is thus about a theoretical idea of imagining as constant part of the complex whole we call the human psyche. It is a story of human beings striving not only for knowledge and exploration but also striving for imagining possibilities.​

Author : Richard T. Gray
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 25,28 MB
Release : 2011-10-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0295801654

GET BOOK

The dialectic between reason and imagination forms a key element in Romantic and post- Romantic philosophy, science, literature, and art. Inventions of the Imagination explores the diverse theories and assessments of this dialectic in essays by philosophers and literary and cultural critics. By the end of the eighteenth century, reason as the predominant human faculty had run its course, and imagination emerged as another force whose contributions to human intellectual existence and productivity had to be newly calculated and constantly recalibrated. The attempt to establish a universal form of reason alongside a plurality of imaginative capacities describes the ideological program of modernism from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. This collection chronicles some of the vicissitudes in the conceptualization and evaluation of the imagination across time and in various disciplines.

Author : Keith Moser
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 810 pages
File Size : 12,61 MB
Release : 2020-07-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9004436359

GET BOOK

This transdisciplinary project represents the most comprehensive study of imagination to date. The eclectic group of international scholars who comprise Imagination and Art propose bold and innovative theoretical frameworks for (re-) conceptualizing imagination in all of its divergent forms.