Logic of Imagination The Expanse of the Elemental [Paperback]

The Shakespearean image of a tempest and its aftermath forms the beginning as well as a major guiding thread of Logic of Imagination. Moving beyond the horizons of his earlier work, Force of Imagination, John Sallis sets out to unsettle the traditional conception of logic, to mark its limits, and, beyond these limits, to launch another, exorbitant logica logic of imagination. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as developments in modern logic and modern mathematics, Sallis shows how a logic of imagination can disclose the most elemental dimensions of nature and of human existence and how, through dialogue with contemporary astrophysics, it can reopen the project of a philosophical cosmology.

John Sallis is Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is author of Force of Imagination (IUP, 2000), On Translation (IUP, 2002), and Topographies (IUP, 2006).

Mature, poetic, erudite, fantastical -- John Sallis' new book is a concrescence of all these, appropriately so, given the characterization therein of imagination as a gathering force which allows the simultaneity of disparates and eludes the logic of non-contradiction.'Logic of Imagination' has the force of a systematic work that ranges from the storms of the imagination that we find on the first page all the way up to the hypermonstrous meaning of dark matter and the event horizon. A work of great expanse, it charts the way the imagination opens up the unimaginable, perhaps even unthinkable, character of our place in the cosmos. It is as if the first cosmologists were to write in light of what contemporary science has brought us to understand.

Precursions
1. The Logic of Contradiction
2. Formal Logic and Beyond
3. Exorbitant Logics
4. The Look of Things
5. Schematism
6. Proper Elementals
7. Elemental Cosmology
Notes
Index