Description
Book SynopsisNo matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there. It is in this fact that we find the distinction between an image and a perception.'' - Jean-Paul Sartre
L'Imagination was published in 1936 when Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty years old. Long out of print, this is the first English translation in many years. The Imagination is Sartre's first full philosophical work, presenting some of the basic arguments concerning phenomenology, consciousness and intentionality that were to later appear in his master works and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy.
Sartre begins by criticising philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of mental images' in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capac
Trade Review
"… excellent work by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. … The new translators have left the division of the text as the author intended. They have also included Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1936 review of the book, as an appendix. … [The] editorial notes are exemplary of the care with which a work of some importance has been made available to us once again." - Santiago Ramos, Continental Philosophy Review
Table of ContentsTranslators' Introduction Introduction 1. The Great Metaphysical Systems 2. The Problem of the Image and the Effort of Psychologists to find a Positive Method 3. The Contradictions of the Classical Conception 4. Husserl Conclusion. Review of L'Imagination, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1936). Index
