Imagination: A Very Short Introduction

Description

Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives, this book explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing. It demonstrates how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways, making possible our experience of a meaningful world.

• Identifies multiple modes of imagination and explores creativity as their material or communicative manifestation
• Explains the philosophy of imagination from ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary cognitive theory
• Includes methodological perspectives from across disciplines, including phenomenology and cognitive theory, evolutionary theory, philosophy of mind, aesthetics and literary theory, as well as the human sciences
• Illuminates imagination from prehistoric creativity to modern technological and artistic innovation
• Engages a broad range of examples from across the arts and sciences, technological invention, and everyday life
• Part of the Very Short Introductions series - over ten million copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

Prof Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. She is author of On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press); The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World; Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature ; Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language; and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, which won The Paris Review Prize.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1:What is imagination?
2:Imagination in human evolution
3:From divine madness to cognitive power
4:The productive and aesthetic imagination
5:The augmentation of reality
6:Creativity from invention to wonder
References and further reading