Download or read book Imagination written by Jim Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We don’t think of imagination the way that we should. The word is often only associated with children, artists and daydreamers, but in reality, imagination is an integral part of almost every action and decision that we make. Simply put, imagination is a person’s ability to create scenarios in his or her head: this can include everything from planning a grocery list, to honing a golf swing, to having religious hallucinations. And while imagination has positive connotations, it can also lead to decreased productivity and cooperation, or worse, the continuous reliving of past trauma.The human brain is remarkable in its ability to imagine—it can imagine complex possible futures, fantasy worlds, or tasty meals. We can use our imaginations to make us relaxed or anxious. We can imagine what the world might be, and construct elaborate plans. People have been fascinated with the machination of the human brain and its ability to imagine for centuries. There are books on creativity, dreams, memory, and the mind in general, but how exactly do we create those scenes in our head? With chapters ranging from hallucination and imaginary friends to how imagination can make you happier and more productive, Jim Davies' Imagination will help us explore the full potential of our own mind.
Download or read book The Scientific Imagination written by Peter Godfrey-Smith and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 361 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 Animals and the Human Imagination written by Aaron Gross and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection reflects the growth of animal studies as an independent field and the rise of 'animality' as a critical lens through which to analyze society and culture, on par with race and gender.
Download or read book Science and Moral Imagination written by Matthew J. Brown and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.
Download or read book Shaping Humanity written by John Gurche and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the process by which the author uses knowledge of fossil discoveries and comparative ape and human anatomy to create forensically accurate representations of human beings' ancient ancestors.
Download or read book In Other Worlds written by Margaret Atwood and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must. Note: The electronic version of this title contains over thirty additional, illuminating eBook-exclusive illustrations by the author.
Download or read book Science and the Human Imagination written by Mary B. Hesse and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dire Cartographies written by Margaret Atwood and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood describes how she came to write her utopian, dystopian works. The word “utopia” comes from Thomas More’s book of the same name—meaning “no place” or “good place,” or both. In “Dire Cartographies,” from the essay collection In Other Worlds, Atwood coins the term “ustopia,” which combines utopia and dystopia, the imagined perfect society and its opposite. Each contains latent versions of the other. Following her intellectual journey and growing familiarity with ustopias fictional and real, from Atlantis to Avatar and Beowulf to Berlin in 1984 (and 1984), Atwood explains how years after abandoning a PhD thesis with chapters on good and bad societies, she produced novel-length dystopias and ustopias of her own. “My rules for The Handmaid’s Tale were simple,” Atwood writes. “I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools.” With great wit and erudition, Atwood reveals the history behind her beloved creations.
Download or read book The Evolution of Imagination written by Stephen T. Asma and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases—all on the fly. Or think of a comedy troupe riffing on a couple of cues from the audience until the whole room is erupting with laughter. Or maybe it’s a team of software engineers brainstorming their way to the next Google, or the Einsteins of the world code-cracking the mysteries of nature. Maybe it’s simply a child playing with her toys. What do all of these activities share? With wisdom, humor, and joy, philosopher Stephen T. Asma answers that question in this book: imagination. And from there he takes us on an extraordinary tour of the human creative spirit. Guided by neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look right at the enigmatic but powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity—the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How is it, he asks, that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society? As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by “what-ifs,” “almosts,” and “maybes,” an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds.
Download or read book Moral Imagination written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection.
Download or read book Vico s Science of Imagination written by Donald Phillip Verene and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full interpretation of Giambattista Vico's thought, based primarily on his major work, the New Science, and on his earlier Latin writings.
Download or read book Science and the Human Imagination written by Jeremy Bernstein and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Bernstein discusses Einstein's work through the year 1905, focusing on the invention of the special theory of relativity, while Dr. Feinberg traces Einstein's contributions to the quantum theory from that year to his death in 1955. The second set of papers focuses on the status of chemical research and chemical education in the state of New Jersey. Dr. Hass cites several chemical achievements of the state, and Dr. Bose suggests ways of encouraging the blossoming of chemical talent in the state.
Download or read book The Cat and the Human Imagination written by Katharine M. Rogers and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2001-03-28 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intelligent, amusing, and affectionate look at cats in history, literature, and art
Download or read book Image and Reality written by Alan J. Rocke and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of “chemical structures,” both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as one of the central defining features of chemistry. In telling this fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields. Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Download or read book Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination written by Russell Blackford and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original book, Russell Blackford discusses the intersection of science fiction and humanity’s moral imagination. With the rise of science and technology in the 19th century, and our continually improving understanding of the cosmos, writers and thinkers soon began to imagine futures greatly different from the present. Science fiction was born out of the realization that future technoscientific advances could dramatically change the world. Along with the developments described in modern science fiction - space societies, conscious machines, and upgraded human bodies, to name but a few - come a new set of ethical challenges and new forms of ethics. Blackford identifies these issues and their reflection in science fiction. His fascinating book will appeal to anyone with an interest in philosophy or science fiction, or in how they interact. “This is a seasoned, balanced analysis of a major issue in our thinking about the future, seen through the lens of science fiction, a central art of our time. Everyone from humanists to technologists should study these ideas and examples. Blackford’s book is wise and savvy, and a delight to read as well.” Greg Benford, author of Timescape.
Download or read book Mythic Imagination Today written by Terry Marks-Tarlow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This monograph brings alive our collective need for story as a guide to the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life.
Download or read book Nature s Imagination written by John Cornwell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection from a 1992 symposium explores how and why mathematicians, astronomers, neuroscientists, and philosophers are moving beyond classic reductionism toward a new paradigm that accounts for the whole and emphasizes events and relationships. Essays examine the irreducibility of mathematics, the incompleteness theorem, consciousness and the mind-body problem, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. For scientists, philosophers, students, and adventurous readers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
