Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition

Use your imagination! The demand is as important as it is confusing. What is the imagination? What is its value? Where does it come from? And where is it going in a time when even the obscene seems overdone and passé?

This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in human cognition. It traces the development of the imagination in Kant's critical philosophy (particularly the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) and claims that the insights of Kantian aesthetic theory, especially concerning the nature of creativity, common sense, and genius, influenced the development of nineteenth-century American philosophy.

The book identifies the central role of the imagination in the philosophy of Peirce, a role often overlooked in analytic treatments of his thought. The final chapters pursue the observation made by Kant and Peirce that imaginative genius is a type of natural gift (ingenium) and must in some way be continuous with the creative force of nature. It makes this final turn by way of contemporary studies of metaphor, embodied cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.

Author: John Kaag
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 02/03/2014
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780823254934

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2015 pg. 1327

About the Author

John Kaag is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His most recent book is Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot.