Thinking Through the Imagination

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 mseems overdone and passé?

This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in humanmcognition. 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.

Acknowledgments | ix

1 The Cultivation of the Imagination | 1

2 Enlightening Thought: Kant and the Imagination | 25

3 C. S. Peirce and the Growth of the Imagination | 57

4 Abduction: Inference and Instinct | 75

5 Imagining Nature | 93

6 Ontology and Imagination: Peirce on Necessity and Agency | 120

7 The Evolution of the Imagination | 139

8 Emergence, Complexity, and Creativity | 165

9 Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative | 192

Notes | 211

Bibliography | 235

Index | 249