Description
Book SynopsisImagination is unruly. It creates the mind's world, linking the sensory realm to the realm of the intellect by oscillating between mind and body, self and world, ideal and real. This title demonstrates that this ambivalence in conceptions of imagination informs fundamental philosophical and aesthetic projects of European modernity.
Trade Review"This is a powerful and exciting book, one that will be of interest not just to scholars of Romanticism, but to all readers interested in the history of the concept of the imagination and the relationship of that history to philosophy, religion, and the process of secularization."
-- Robert Mitchell * Studies in Romanticism *
"The clarity and precision with which Mind's World addresses philosophical constructions of the imagination and their implications for theories of the subject make it an invaluable resource."
-- David M. Baulch * Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net *
"Schlutz's book is a tour de force through some very difficult patches of intellectual history. Throughout he is as clear and surefooted as the subject matter permits. Recommended."
* Choice *
"One of the seminal studies of Western intellectual history to appear in the last decade, Schlutz's book moves through literature and philosophical texts in French, German, and English in a cross-linguistic and multi-disciplinary look at the roots of Romantic imagination and its paradoxes."
* Prism(s) *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Rhetoric: Contexts of Imagination
Aristotle, Phantasia, and the Problem of Epistemology
Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Vagaries of the Sublunar World
Phantasia and Ecstatic Knowledge
"A More Skillful Artist than Imitation"
2. Dreams, Doubts, and Evil Demons: Descartes and Imagination
Meditatio Prima: Certainty, the Cogito, and Imagination
Imagination in the Rules
Meditatio Secunda: The World of the Cogito
Descartes, Montaigne, and Pascal
Analogies and Enthusiasm
Excogitations: Fabulating the Cogito
3. The Reasonable Imagination: Immanuel Kant's Critical Philosophy
Imagination in the Limits of Pure Reason
Dreamers and Madmen: Imagination in Anthropology
Natural Art and Sublime Madness: Imagination in the Critique of Judgment
4. The Highest Point of Philosophy: Fichte's Reimagining of the Kantian System
The Logics of Positing: Intellectual Intuition and the Absolute Subject
Ecstasy, Inspired Communication, and Philosophical Genius
Light, Dusk, and Darkness: The Reconciliation of Opposites
The Metaphysics of Oscillation and the Truth of Imagination
Reason's Fixations: Arresting Imagination
5. A System without Foundations: Poetic Subjectivity in Friedrich von Hardenberg's Ordo Inversus
A System without Foundations
Fantasy and the Body
6. Divine Law and Abject Subjectivity: Coleridge and the Double Knowledge of Imagination
Divine Imagination
The Abyss of the Empirical Self
Coda: Imagining Ideology
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
