Imagination
I'm trying to research the nature of the imagination. Anyone know of any good articles about it? I got _Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts_ (ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes) from the library, but I could certainly use suggestions of where else to look.
8 comments:
You might want to consider taking a look at Hume's 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding' or his 'Treatise of Human Nautre.' Also, you might want to check out 'Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger' edited by Albet Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. Finally, in "The Science of the Mind' by Owen Flanagan, there is a discussion that might be interesting to you. It's on page 104, "The Concept of the 'Operant': Selection by Consequences."
Happy hunting!
Just in case anyone was curious: I was the one who deleted one of the three (including this one) comments mentioned here. I accidently posted the 'Happy hunting!" comment twice. So,I deleted it.
Putnam and Nussbaum have some work on imagination. Nussbaum is of course coming at it from an Aristotelian point of view. I have the references at my office, come and see me tomorrow. I have a number of books out of the library on moral imagination--so see me before you recall!!
It might help of if you could clarify better what about the nature of imagination are you looking at. I am very interested in the role that imagination plays in practical reasoning and ethical behavior. How does a developed imagination help the ethical person be ethical. This is where the work of someone like Nussbaum comes in: she's looking to literature and the like to provide us with models of ethics. Several of her essays in Love's Knowledge speak to this role of imagination.
Given the nature of your project, I am thinking you are more interested in how imagination relates to the nature of fiction. So this might not be helpful
Well, I am interested in how the imagination relates to fiction, but at the moment I want to learn just more about how the imagination works (or is theorized to work). There are a lot of theories of fiction (and art) that rely heavily on the imagination. So, in order to critique them, I want to get a hold of the literature about how the imagination works.
Sounds like you are looking for something in psychology or cog sci.(not that there's anything wrong with that!) I'll be in my office today and post the references for the Nussbaum/Putnam work on imagination.
Aristotle appears to have thought that imagination is part of the perceptual system. I think imagination is a related but separate function. It makes use of perceptual memory to form its "images" but it is not itself an action of perceiving.
There are several essays in Nussbaum and Rorty's collection Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (I have it so please don't recall). Also Nussbaum's collection on De Motu might have more. Nussbaum and Putnam co-authored a paper on Aristotle's theory of mind which deals with imagination (I have it and can make a copy for you). Actually, I'll copy four papers that I think might be relevant and put them in your mailbox.
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