Thinking Through the Imagination

Autorentext

John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (Princeton, 2020, Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award), Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018, pbk Picador, 2019, NPR Book of the Year), American Philosophy: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016, NPR Book of the Year, New York Times Editors' Choice), and Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot (Lexington, 2013), and coauthor with Sarah Kreps of Drone Warfare (Polity, 2015, Choice Outstanding Title).

Klappentext

Use your imagination! The demand is as important as it is confusing. What is the imagination? What is its value? Where does it come from? And where is it going in a time when even the obscene seems overdone and passé? This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in human cognition. It traces the development of the imagination in Kant's critical philosophy (particularly the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) and claims that the insights of Kantian aesthetic theory, especially concerning the nature of creativity, common sense, and genius, influenced the development of nineteenth-century American philosophy. The book identifies the central role of the imagination in the philosophy of Peirce, a role often overlooked in analytic treatments of his thought. The final chapters pursue the observation made by Kant and Peirce that imaginative genius is a type of natural gift (ingenium) and must in some way be continuous with the creative force of nature. It makes this final turn by way of contemporary studies of metaphor, embodied cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.

Zusammenfassung
Traces the concept of the imagination through German idealism of the 18th century, the American philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the findings of contemporary cognitive neuroscience in order to argue for the centrality of aesthetics in human cognition.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments | ix
1 The Cultivation of the Imagination | 1
2 Enlightening Thought: Kant and the Imagination | 25
3 C. S. Peirce and the Growth of the Imagination | 57
4 Abduction: Inference and Instinct | 75
5 Imagining Nature | 93
6 Ontology and Imagination: Peirce on Necessity and Agency | 120
7 The Evolution of the Imagination | 139
8 Emergence, Complexity, and Creativity | 165
9 Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative | 192
Notes | 211
Bibliography | 235
Index | 249