Description

Book Synopsis
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world. Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together

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

Imagination

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A Paperback / softback by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

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    View other formats and editions of Imagination by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

    Publisher: Oxford University Press
    Publication Date: 26/10/2023
    ISBN13: 9780198830023, 978-0198830023
    ISBN10: 0198830025
    Also in:
    ELT & Literary Studies Literary theory Cognitivism, cognitive theory Philosophy: aesthetics

    Description

    Book Synopsis
    Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world. Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together

    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

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