Download or read book The Unity of Imagining written by Fabian Dorsch and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly ambitious, wide ranging, immensely impressive and ground-breaking work Fabian Dorsch surveys just about every account of the imagination that has ever been proposed. He identifies five central types of imagining that any unifying theory must accommodate and sets himself the task of determining whether any theory of what imagining consists in covers these five paradigms. Focussing on what he takes to be the three main theories, and giving them each equal consideration, he faults the first two and embraces the third. The scholarship is immaculate, the writing crystal clear and the argumentation always powerful. Malcolm Budd, FBA, Emeritus Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London Excerpt Open publication

Download or read book The Profile of Imagining written by Robert Hopkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is sensory imagining and what role does it play in our lives? How does visualizing a castle, running through a tune in one's head, or imagining the taste of fish ice cream relate to perceiving such things, or to remembering them? What are the connections between imagining and agency, and how does it relate to emotion and other affect? The Profile of Imagining offers a theory that answers these and many other questions. It argues that sensory imagining involves the redeployment of resources central to perception, though in a radically different context and to very different effect. The result is a view that explains central features of imagining's phenomenology and functional role, including its capacity to capture what it would be like to perceive its objects, while acknowledging the many and striking differences between imagining and sensing. Hopkins shows how the view can be extended to imagining in other forms, especially the imagining of affect; and uses it to argue for some surprising conclusions: that imagining something is not a way to engage with its aesthetic character; and that imagining provokes real feeling much less often than is usually assumed.

Download or read book Explaining Imagination written by Peter Langland-Hassan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process--one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states--judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.

Download or read book Consciousness and the World written by Brian O'Shaughnessy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian O'Shaughnessy presents a theory of consciousness, one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. He investigates what consciousness is and how it engages, through perception, with the world.

Download or read book Fiction written by Catharine Abell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By taking a distinctively institutional approach, Catharine Abell provides a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. In particular, she draws attention to the epistemology of fiction, which has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, yet few attempts have been made to explain how audiences identify their contents, or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of them. This book answers both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relation between them: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction? What is the nature of fictive utterances? How do audiences identify the contents of authors' fictive utterances? How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it? This book develops the first single theory to provide answers to these questions and many more.

Download or read book Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory written by Fiona Macpherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents ten new essays on the nature of perceptual imagination and perceptual memory. The central questions are: How do perceptual imagination and memory resemble and differ from each other and from other kinds of sensory experience? And what role does each play in perception and in the acquisition of knowledge?

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 Hemispheric Imaginings written by Gretchen Murphy and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1823, President James Monroe announced that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any future European colonization and that the United States would protect the Americas as a space destined for democracy. Over the next century, these ideas—which came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine—provided the framework through which Americans understood and articulated their military and diplomatic role in the world. Hemispheric Imaginings demonstrates that North Americans conceived and developed the Monroe Doctrine in relation to transatlantic literary narratives. Gretchen Murphy argues that fiction and journalism were crucial to popularizing and making sense of the Doctrine’s contradictions, including the fact that it both drove and concealed U.S. imperialism. Presenting fiction and popular journalism as key arenas in which such inconsistencies were challenged or obscured, Murphy highlights the major role writers played in shaping conceptions of the U.S. empire. Murphy juxtaposes close readings of novels with analyses of nonfiction texts. From uncovering the literary inspirations for the Monroe Doctrine itself to tracing visions of hemispheric unity and transatlantic separation in novels by Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Lew Wallace, and Richard Harding Davis, she reveals the Doctrine’s forgotten cultural history. In making a vital contribution to the effort to move American Studies beyond its limited focus on the United States, Murphy questions recent proposals to reframe the discipline in hemispheric terms. She warns that to do so risks replicating the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary claim to isolate the Americas from the rest of the world.

Download or read book Postcolonial Imaginings written by David Punter and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This deeply engaging, historically and culturally informed book provides new perspectives on a wide range of writers, and at the same time provides a radically new development of many of the most pertinent issues in the field of postcolonial writing and theory. It constitutes a major new engagement between the 'postcolonial' and a conception of the literary which is richly innovative in its deployment of psychoanalytic, deconstructive and other approaches to the text.The book begins with some brief background to the issue of decolonisation and its contemporary effects. It is informed throughout by a clear sense of literary and political context, within which chosen texts - by well-known writers (Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite) as well as less well-known ones (Joan Riley, Susan Power, Abdulrazak Gurnah) and writers not often seen in a postcolonial context (James Kelman, Seamus Deane, Hanif Kureishi) - can be situated. The chapters which follow are based around themes such as violent geographics; hallucination, dream and the exotic; mourning and melancholy; diaspora and exile; delocalisation and the alibi. This profoundly new approach to the complexities of the postcolonial allows the reader to appreciate some of the richness, but at the same time the political and cultural ambivalence, which underlies postcolonial writing.Throughout the book David Punter continually questions, as one would expect from his many previous books, the definition and scope of the 'postcolonial'. It is seen throughout as a phenomenon not restricted to the ex- or neo-colonies but as a key characterisation of all our lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is an indissoluble part of the development of national imaginings and, at the same time, an alibi for the emergence of a violently assertive 'new world order' committed to the management or obliteration of difference. By juxtaposing texts from different cultural traditions and topographies, from

Download or read book Modality written by Bob Hale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions - are they objective features of mind-independent reality? This volume presents new work on modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming philosophers."--[Source inconnue].

Download or read book Apt Imaginings written by Jonathan Gilmore and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apt Imaginings addresses the question of how our emotions and desires for the contents of fictions, fantasies, and other products of the imagination relate to the feelings we have about things in the real world. A contribution to the theory of the emotions, the philosophy of fiction, and the psychology of art, this book argues that the normative criteria that determine the fit, morality, or rationality of our feelings for what we believe are distinct from those criteria that apply to what we imagine.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination written by Amy Kind and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding Handbook contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the philosophy of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and ‘imaginative resistance’ Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art.

Download or read book Mathematical Imagining written by Christof Weber and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Mathematical Imagining, the author makes the case that the ability to imagine, manipulate, and explain mathematical images and situations is fundamental to all mathematics and particularly important to higher level study. Most importantly, drawing on years of experiments in his own classroom, he shows that mathematical imagining is a skill that can be taught efficiently and effectively in secondary mathematics"--

Download or read book Imagination and Experience written by Íngrid Vendrell Ferran and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together two philosophical research areas that have been subject to increased attention: work regarding the unique character of having an experience and studies on the nature and powers of imagination. The importance of imagination seems to stand in tension with the assumed unique and irreplaceable role of experience in our lives. However, new arguments in various philosophical debates suggest that there is a need to examine how both areas of research interrelate and can enrich one another. The chapters in this volume examine whether the traditional accounts of experience and imagination need to be challenged. They are divided into thematic sections that discuss epistemological, ontological, normative, phenomenological, and intersubjective questions related to experience and imagination. Imagination and Experience is an essential resource for scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of psychology.

Download or read book Savage Imaginings written by Lynette Russell and published by Australian Scholary Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the dominant discussions in Australian Aboriginal history. Its central tenet is that European textual representations of Aboriginal Australians have characteristically involved images and imaginings of primitivism, great antiquity and sameness. The author argues that Aboriginal-focussed museum displays, textual studies and photo-essays have reduced Aboriginal culture to a moment frozen in pre-contact time.

Download or read book Mimesis as Make Believe written by Kendall L. Walton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-15 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representations—in visual arts and in fiction—play an important part in our lives and culture. Kendall Walton presents here a theory of the nature of representation, which illuminates its many varieties and goes a long way toward explaining its importance. Drawing analogies to children’s make believe activities, Walton constructs a theory that addresses a broad range of issues: the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, how depiction differs from description, the notion of points of view in the arts, and what it means for one work to be more “realistic” than another. He explores the relation between appreciation and criticism, the character of emotional reactions to literary and visual representations, and what it means to be caught up emotionally in imaginary events. Walton’s theory also provides solutions to the thorny philosophical problems of the existence—or ontological standing—of fictitious beings, and the meaning of statements referring to them. And it leads to striking insights concerning imagination, dreams, nonliteral uses of language, and the status of legends and myths. Throughout Walton applies his theoretical perspective to particular cases; his analysis is illustrated by a rich array of examples drawn from literature, painting, sculpture, theater, and film. Mimesis as Make-Believe is important reading for everyone interested in the workings of representational art.

Download or read book Collective Imaginings written by Moira Gatens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-22 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would the work of the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza concern us today? How can Spinoza shed any light on contemporary thought? In this intriguing book, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd show us that in spite of or rather because of Spinoza's apparent strangeness, his philosophy can be a rich resource for cultural self-understanding in the present. Collective Imaginings draws on recent re-assessments of the philosophy of Spinoza to develop new ways of conceptualising issues of freedom and difference. This ground-breaking study will be invaluable reading to anyone wishing to gain a fresh perspective on Spinoza's thought.