Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images [Hardcover]

This book discusses that imagination is as important to thinking and reasoning as it is to making and acting. By reexamining our philosophical and psychological heritage, it traces a framework, a conceptual topology, that underlies the most disparate theories: a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances. It shows how this framework was progressively developed by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, and how it is reflected in more recent developments in theorists as different as Peirce, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Bachelard. The conceptual topology of imagination incorporates logic, mathematics, and science as well as production, play, and art. Recognizing this topology can move us past the confusions to a unifying view of imagination for the future. 

This book offers a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances, and traces the development of the concept from Plato to Descartes to Kant, and on through recent theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Bachelard.

1 Beginning in the Middle of Things.-

2 Locating Emergent Appearance.-

3 Locating Imagination: The Inceptive Field Productivity and Differential Topology of

Imagining (Plus What It Means to Play a Game).-

4 Plato and the Ontological Placement of Images.-

5 Aristotles phantasia: From Animal Sensation to Understanding Forms of Fields.-

6 The Dynamically Imaginative Cognition of Descartes.-

7 The Cartesian Heritage: Kant and the Conceptual Topology of Imagination and Reason.-

8 After Kant: Appropriating the Conceptual Topology of Imagination.-