Understanding Imagination - The Reason of Images

This book discusses that imagination is as important to thinking and reasoning as it is to making and acting. By reexamining our philosophical and psychological heritage, it traces a framework, a conceptual topology, that underlies the most disparate theories: a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances. It shows how this framework was progressively developed by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, and how it is reflected in more recent developments in theorists as different as Peirce, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Bachelard. The conceptual topology of imagination incorporates logic, mathematics, and science as well as production, play, and art. Recognizing this topology can move us past the confusions to a unifying view of imagination for the future.

List of contents

1 Beginning in the Middle of Things.- 2 Locating Emergent Appearance.- 3 Locating Imagination: The Inceptive Field Productivity and Differential Topology of Imagining (Plus What It Means to Play a Game).- 4 Plato and the Ontological Placement of Images.- 5 Aristotle's phantasia: From Animal Sensation to Understanding Forms of Fields.- 6 The Dynamically Imaginative Cognition of Descartes.- 7 The Cartesian Heritage: Kant and the Conceptual Topology of Imagination and Reason.- 8 After Kant: Appropriating the Conceptual Topology of Imagination.- 9 The Ethos of Imagining.

Summary

This book discusses that imagination is as important to thinking and reasoning as it is to making and acting. By reexamining our philosophical and psychological heritage, it traces a framework, a conceptual topology, that underlies the most disparate theories: a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances. It shows how this framework was progressively developed by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, and how it is reflected in more recent developments in theorists as different as Peirce, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Bachelard. The conceptual topology of imagination incorporates logic, mathematics, and science as well as production, play, and art. Recognizing this topology can move us past the confusions to a unifying view of imagination for the future.

Product details

• Authors: Dennis L Sepper, Dennis L. Sepper
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.01.2013
• EAN: 9789400765061
• ISBN: 978-94-0-076506-1
• No. of pages: 533
• Dimensions: 161 mm x 242 mm x 35 mm
• Weight: 918 g
• Illustrations: IX, 533 p.
• Series: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science; Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; Psychologie, Geschichte, Philosophie, B, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Philosophy of Science, History of Philosophy, History of Science, Philosophische Traditionen und Denkschulen, Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and science, History of philosophy, philosophical traditions, Philosophy, general, History of Psychology, scientific imagination, mathematical imagination, aesthetic imagination