Download or read book Beauty Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination written by Mojca Küplen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a solution to the problem known in philosophical aesthetics as the paradox of ugliness, namely, how an object that is displeasing can retain our attention and be greatly appreciated. It does this by exploring and refining the most sophisticated and thoroughly worked out theoretical framework of philosophical aesthetics, Kant’s theory of taste, which was put forward in part one of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The book explores the possibility of incorporating ugliness, a negative aesthetic concept, into the overall Kantian aesthetic picture. It addresses a debate of the last two decades over whether Kant's aesthetics should allow for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. The book critically reviews the main interpretations of Kant’s central notion of the free play of imagination and understanding and offers a new interpretation of free play, one that allows for the possibility of a disharmonious state of mind and ugliness. In addition, the book also applies an interpretation of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetics to resolve certain issues that have been raised in contemporary aesthetics, namely the possibility of appreciating artistic and natural ugliness and the role of disgust in artistic representation. Offering a theoretical and practical analysis of different kinds of negative aesthetic experiences, this book will help readers acquire a better understanding of his or her own evaluative processes, which may be helpful in coping with complex aesthetic experiences. Readers will gain unique insight into how ugliness can be offensive, yet, at the same time, fascinating, interesting and captivating.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Imagination written by Galit Wellner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining perspectives from both continental and analytic philosophy, this timely volume explores how imagination today both shapes and is shaped by technology, art and ethics. Imagination is one of the most significant and broadly examined concepts in contemporary philosophy and is frequently understood as a basic human faculty that enables complex activities. This book shows, however, that imagination is more than a mere enabler. Whilst imagination shapes our experiences, it is at the same time shaped by our environments. Some of the most creative manifestations of imagination are the result of its two-way interaction with art or technology, or both. In short, imagination co-shapes us. Beyond the traditional perspectives of Kant and Heidegger, The Philosophy of Imagination: Technology, Art and Ethics examines our dynamic relationship with imagination, from contemporary technological advancements such as AI that transform the whole ecosystem to imagination in the context of videogames and literary fiction. Analysing societal imagination, it addresses the relationship between the racial imaginary and white ignorance, as well as the effects that societal mechanisms such as lockdowns can have on our imagination. Taking its cue from the here and now, this volume brings together leading international scholars to investigate how the concept of co-shaping allows us to see imagination and its crucial role in society in new and productive ways.

Download or read book Image Imagination written by Martha Langford and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2005 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly illustrated exploration of the imagination in photography featuring the work of over sixty international artists.

Download or read book The Iconoclastic Imagination written by Ned O'Gorman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bloody and fiery spectacles in American public life, from the 1960s to the present, have given us moments of catastrophe that easily answer to the question of where-were-you-when, events that shape our ways of seeing the Cold War and after. Three such iconic catastrophes are the John F. Kennedy assassination, the response by Ronald Reagan to the Challenger disaster, and 9/11. Why are these spectacles so packed with meaning? They are images of destruction, raising the questions for us of where their power comes from, what sort of history might they construct, what sort of world do they destroy. O Gorman approaches each one as an icon of iconoclasm, as an exemplar of fiery demise that gives us a distinct way to imagine social existence in American life. Here is his argument: in the 50 years since the Kennedy assassination, a period that witnessed the rise of neoliberalism, the most powerful way for publics to see America was in the destruction of its representative symbols, or icons, because in such catastrophes we grasp the impossibility of any image adequate to representing America. If neoliberalism the emergence of free market economics in social philosophy and public policy is linked with iconoclasm, that is, if neoliberalism promotes and benefits from the destruction of icons, we are led to reconsider events that seem to rupture a given world (catastrophes), or are beyond representation (the economy). Market ideology moves to a transcendent realm of invisible principles that can escape accountability and command sacrifice. The core arguments are challenging (indeed, iconoclastic), but this book will put a whole new kind of spotlight on neoliberalism and on the status of the image (and visual representation) in American political culture. The results are stunning: richly interwoven philosophical, theological, and rhetorical traditions turn out to be a basis for a complex and innovative approach to Cold War America, political theory, and visual culture studies."

Download or read book Imagination a Very Short Introduction written by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Hegel s Theory of Imagination written by Jennifer Ann Bates and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filling an important gap in post-Kantian philosophy, Hegel's Theory of Imagination focuses on the role of the imagination, and resolves the question of its apparent absence in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Jennifer Ann Bates discusses Hegel's theory of the imagination through the early and late Philosophy of Spirit lectures, and reveals that a dialectic between the two sides of the imagination (the "night" of inwardizing consciousness and the "light" of externalizing material) is essential to thought and community. The complexity and depth of Hegel's insights make this book essential reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding how central the imagination is to our every thought.

Download or read book Oasis of Imagination written by Ted Turnau and published by Inter-Varsity Press. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should the church's cultural witness be? Too often, it has been marked by political strong-arming or fearful withdrawal into the "Christian bubble." There is another way: creative cultural engagement, using our imaginations to plant oases in the desert, breathable spaces that refresh, challenge, and draw together Christians and non-Christians alike. Oases refresh the soul, provoke discussion, challenge assumptions, and lead the imagination to a new place. In Oasis of Imagination, Ted Turnau lays out the Biblical mandate for engaging culture, and why the imaginative path holds promise. He explores the nature of the imagination from both Scripture and nature. He asks, "What makes a Christian imagination that resonates with non-Christians different?" He explores examples of Christian creativity done well from video games to movies to music to The Lord of the Rings. He challenges the church, artist and non-artist alike, to be intentional about their own imaginative lives, how artists and non-artists can support each other, as they together engage in building bridges and being cultural ambassadors to the wider community. In-depth and wide-ranging, Oasis of Imagination equips and encourages Christians, whatever their calling, to consider how to imaginatively enter into the broader cultural conversation, beyond the culture-warring and Christian bubbles. It seeks to provoke a conversation within the church between its artists and non-artists about how best to unleash our God-given creativity to shine light into the broader culture.

Download or read book The Anarchist Imagination written by Carl Levy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a broad ranging introduction to twenty-first-century anarchism which includes a wide array of theoretical approaches as well as a variety of empirical and geographical perspectives. The book demonstrates how the anarchist imagination has influenced the humanities and social sciences including anthropology, art, feminism, geography, international relations, political science, postcolonialism, and sociology. Drawing on a long historical narrative that encompasses the 'waves' of anarchist movements from the classical anarchists (1840s to 1940s), post-war wave of student, counter-cultural and workers' control anarchism of the 1960s and 1970s to the DIY politics and Temporary Autonomous Zones of the 1990s right up to the Occupy! Movement and beyond, the aim of this volume is to cover the humanities and the social sciences in an era of anarchist revival in academia. Anarchist philosophy and anarchistic methodologies have re-emerged in a range of disciplines from Organization Studies, to Law, to Political Economy to Political Theory and International Relations, and Anthropology to Cultural Studies. Anarchist approaches to freedom, democracy, ethics, violence, authority, punishment, homelessness, and the arbitration of justice have spawned a broad array of academic publications and research projects. But this volume remembers an older story, in other words, the continuous role of the anarchist imagination as muse, provocateur, goading adversary, and catalyst in the stimulation of research and creative activity in the humanities and social sciences from the middle of the nineteenth century to today. This work will be essential reading for scholars and students of anarchism, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Download or read book Thinking Through the Imagination written by John Kaag and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 mseems overdone and passé? This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in humanmcognition. 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.

Download or read book Travel and Imagination written by Garth Lean and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imagination has long been associated with travel and tourism; from the seventeenth century when the showman and his peepshow box would take the village crowd to places, cities and lands through the power of stories, to today when we rely on a different range of boxes to whisk us away on our imaginative travels: the television, the cinema and the computer. Even simply the notion of travel, it would seem, gives us license to daydream. The imagination thus becomes a key concept that blurs the boundaries between our everyday lives and the idea of travel. Yet, despite what appears to be a close and comfortable link, there is an absence of scholarly material looking at travel and the imagination. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, archaeologists, heritage researchers, literary scholars and creative writers, this edited collection explores the socio-cultural phenomenon of imagination and travel. The volume reflects upon imagination in the context of many forms of physical and non-physical travel, inviting scholars to explore this fascinating, yet complex, area of inquiry in all of its wonderful colour, slipperiness, mystery and intrigue. The book intends to provide a catalyst for thinking, discussion, research and writing, with the vision of generating a cannon of scholarship on travel and the imagination that is currently absent from the literature.

Download or read book The Life of Imagination written by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement. The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.

Download or read book Handbook of Imagination and Culture written by Tania Zittoun and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagination allows individuals and groups to think beyond the here-and-now, to envisage alternatives, to create parallel worlds, and to mentally travel through time. Imagination is both extremely personal (for example, people imagine unique futures for themselves) and deeply social, as our imagination is fed with media and other shared representations. As a result, imagination occupies a central position within the life of mind and society. Expanding the boundaries of disciplinary approaches, the Handbook of Imagination and Culture expertly illustrates this core role of imagination in the development of children, adolescents, adults, and older persons today. Bringing together leading scholars in sociocultural psychology and neighboring disciplines from around the world, this edited volume guides readers towards a much deeper understanding of the conditions of imagining, its resources, its constraints, and the consequences it has on different groups of people in different domains of society. Summarily, this Handbook places imagination at the center, and offers readers new ways to examine old questions regarding the possibility of change, development, and innovation in modern society.

Download or read book The Female Imagination written by Patricia Meyer Spacks and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there such a thing as a female literary imagination – a special brand of insight and intuition that characterises women’s writing? Is there something about a novel, whether by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Doris Lessing, that tells us that it could only have been written by a woman? Do the subject matter, form and style that women choose throw light on the way they think and feel? In this brilliant and highly readable book, originally published in 1976, Patricia Spacks analyses the female view of the world. Juxtaposing – sometimes in startlingly original combination some eighty books written between the seventeenth century and the present day she uses both literary and psychological analysis to explore patterns that recur again and again in the stories women tell – whether about their own lives or the lives of their fictional characters. She dissects female experience in the twentieth century as viewed by an array of writers ranging from Kate Millet to Virginia Woolf; examines the interplay of social passivity and psychic power that dominates characters such as Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, the altruism that impels Jane Austen’s and Mrs Gaskell’s heroines, the ‘acceptance’ of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsey, the personal and social conflicts that beset so many of the adolescent girls that figure in both nineteenth-century and contemporary literature; reveals the complex motives that can be bound up in a women’s deliberate choice of the artist’s role, as appears in the writings of Isadora Duncan’s and Dora Carrington, Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary McCartney – and the surprising forms ‘freedom’ can take, as for Beatrice Webb in the East End of London or Isak Dinerson in the wilds of Africa... The voices echo and re-echo across the years in fascinating counter-point. Their range is enormous – rebels and reformers, actresses and painters, Society ladies and unknown girls in small towns, novels, poems, memoirs, diaries and letters, both English and American, and alongside classics such as Wuthering Heights and well-known modern works such as The Bell Jar, Patricia Spacks introduces an intriguing selection of relatively unknown writers, such as Napoleon’s psychoanalyst great-niece Marie Bonaparte, the Victorian arch-fantasist Mary MacLane and the autobiography of a seventeenth-century Duchess. The Female Imagination is much more than a study of women’s writing. It is an inquiry into the nature of female thought, self-expression and experience. As such it should appeal to every educated woman – and to many men too.

Download or read book The Amorous Imagination written by D. Andrew Yost and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Amorous Imagination, D. Andrew Yost builds upon Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love to argue that through the interpretive activities of the imagination the Beloved appears to the lover as this Other, not the Other. Weaving together insights from Romantic thought and contemporary French philosophy, Yost describes the distinctive role the imagination plays in individuating another person so that they appear radically unique, special, and unsubstitutable. This radical uniqueness—or haecceitas—emerges out of the lovers' engagement in an "endless hermeneutic," an ongoing process of creative and responsive meaning-making that grounds the lovers' lives in each other and opens them up to new possibilities. All of this, Yost argues, is made possible by the amorous imagination. Drawing from the deep well of love poetry, mythology, philosophy, and literature The Amorous Imagination comes to the provocative conclusion that without the productive power of the imagination love itself could not emerge.

Download or read book Knowledge Through Imagination written by Amy Kind and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Scientific Imagination written by Arnon Levy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imagination, our capacity to entertain thoughts and ideas "in the mind's eye," is indispensable in science as elsewhere in human life. Indeed, common scientific practices such as modeling and idealization rely on the imagination to construct simplified, stylized scenarios essential for scientific understanding. Yet the philosophy of science has traditionally shied away from according an important role to the imagination, wary of psychologizing fundamental scientific concepts like explanation and justification. In recent years, however, advances in thinking about creativity and fiction, and their relation to theorizing and understanding, have prompted a move away from older philosophical perspectives and toward a greater acknowledgement of the place of the imagination in scientific practice. Meanwhile, psychologists have engaged in significant experimental work on the role of the imagination in causal thinking and probabilistic reasoning. The Scientific Imagination delves into this burgeoning area of debate at the intersection of the philosophy and practice of science, bringing together the work of leading researchers in philosophy and psychology. Philosophers discuss such topics as modeling, idealization, metaphor and explanation, examining their role within science as well as how they affect questions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language. Psychologists discuss how our imaginative capacities develop and how they work, their relationships with processes of reasoning, and how they compare to related capacities, such as categorization and counterfactual thinking. Together, these contributions combine to provide a comprehensive and exciting picture of the scientific imagination.

Download or read book Imagination and Principles written by M. Coeckelbergh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-10-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to say that imagination plays a role in moral reasoning, and what are the theoretical and practical implications? Engaging with three traditions in moral theory and confronting them with three contexts of moral practice, this book comprehensively explores these questions and the relation between imagination and principles.