Abstract
The history of imagination raises different constellations of questions, with few definitive answers. Is imagination the source of creativity (as popular culture has held since Romanticism) or a producer of falsehoods (perhaps the majority position in premodern and early modern thought)? Is it essential to all kinds of thought (as Aristotle and medieval Aristotelians believed) or is it transcended by rational intellect? Is mathematics a form of intellect or a form of imagining? Is imagination a function of memory or memory a form of imagining? Is it slavishly dependent on sensation or does it transcend it? What boundaries can be drawn between imagination and other powers of the human psyche: sensation, intellect, will, feeling, emotion, desire? Wherever one looks—to the remote past, to contemporary psychology and philosophy, and everywhere in between—there is little agreement about the answers, and often more confusion than clarity. This book provides a new framework for investigation by identifying key features of the basic phenomena of imagining and addressing the question of why philosophy and psychology have hitherto failed to do this. It also reconstructs both recent and remote history to show that there is an important tradition of thinking about imagination in major thinkers—chiefly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, but with important themes from Hume, Hegel, Peirce, Saussure, and Wittgenstein—that has identified the key features of imagination. But that tradition, occluded and occulted, has been repeatedly overlooked, concealed, and forgotten, for more than two millennia.