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There is a long-standing tradition in philosophy that defines imagination as engaging with things that are not real or present; as a kind of fantasy. Immanuel Kant offered an original theory of imagination as something that shapes our encounters with what is real, present, and pervades our lives. This book brings this theory of imagining to light.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I Imagination in General
- 1: Imagination as a Cognitive Capacity
- 2: Imagination and the Two Stems of Cognition
- 3: Imagination Is Part of Sensibility
- 4: Three Definitions of Imagination
- Part II Imagination in Perception and Experience
- 5: Empirical Imagination in Perception and Experience
- 6: A Priori Imagination and the Conditions of Experience I: The Transcendental Deduction
- 7: A Priori Imagination and the Conditions of Experience II: The Schematism
- Part III Imagination in Aesthetics
- 8: Imagination and the Appreciation of Beauty
- 9: Artistic Imagination
- 10: Imagination and the Sublime
- Part IV Imagination in Practical Agency and Morality
- 11: The Possibility of Moral Imagination
- 12: Imaginative Sight and the Faculty of Desire
- 13: Imaginative Exhibition in Morality
- Conclusion
About the author
Samantha Matherne is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of Humanities in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University. She is the author of Cassirer for the Routledge Philosophers Series and one of the authors of The Geography of Taste, along with Dominic McIver Lopes, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay (OUP 2024). She is the editor of the first English translation of the work of the German philosopher, Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Essays on Art, Aesthetics, and Value, translated by Daniel Dahlstrom (in Oxford's New History of Philosophy Series, 2023). She has also published articles on Immanuel Kant, Post-Kantian traditions, and Aesthetics.
Summary
Samantha Matherne defends a systematic interpretation of the philosopher Immanuel Kants theory of imagination. In contrast with more traditional theories of imagination, as a kind of fantasy that we exercise only in relation to objects that are not real or not present, Matherne argues that Kant theorizes imagination as something that we exercise just as much in relation to objects that are real and present. In short, she attributes to Kant a view of imagining as something that pervades our lives. In order to bring out this pervasiveness, Matherne offers an account of what kind of mental capacity Kant takes imagination to be in general. She then explores Kants picture of how we exercise our imagination in perception, ordinary experience, the appreciation of beauty and sublimity, the production of art, the pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit of morality. However, she makes the case that Kants analysis of this wide range of phenomena is underwritten by a unified theory of what imagination is, as a remarkably flexible cognitive capacity that we can exercise in constrained and creative, playful and serious ways.
Additional text
Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.
