Concept
Imagination
Overview
mental ability to produce and simulate novel objects, people and ideas in the mind without any immediate input of the senses
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Imagination is discussed.
Much memory, or memory of many things, is called Experience. Againe, Imagination being only of those things which have been formerly perceived by Sense, either all at once, or by parts at severall times; The former, (which is the imagining the whole object, as it was presented to the sense) is Simple Imagination; as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is Compounded; as when from…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph
The art of talking without thinking is particularly necessary to public speakers, who must go on when once they are on their feet, and gradually acquire the habit of behaving in private as they do before an audience. Yet the statements they make must be admitted to be often imaginative. The essence of imagination, therefore, does not lie in images.
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Imagination is the faculty of representing an object even without its presence in intuition. Now, as all our intuition is sensuous, imagination, by reason of the subjective condition under which alone it can give a corresponding intuition to the conceptions of the understanding, belongs to sensibility.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph
The mental powers, therefore, whose union (in a certain relation) constitutes _genius_ are Imagination and Understanding. In the employment of the Imagination for cognition it submits to the constraint of the Understanding and is subject to the limitation of being conformable to the concept of the latter. On the other hand, in an aesthetical point of view it is free to furnish unsought, over and above that agreement…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Here, then, is a sensible difference betwixt one species of ideas and another. But of this more fully hereafter.[2] There is another difference betwixt these two kinds of ideas, which is no less evident, namely, that though neither the ideas of the memory nor imagination, neither the lively nor faint ideas, can make their appearance in the mind, unless their correspondent impressions have gone before to prepare the…
David Hume, Philosophical Works, v. 1
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is
Philosophers who discussed Imagination
- Giambattista Vico
- Cornelius Castoriadis
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Peter Hacker
- Gaston Bachelard
- Tamar Gendler
- John Sallis
- Kieran Egan (philosopher)
- Leonardo Polo
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Cognition
- Artificial intelligence
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Creativity
- Immanuel Kant
- Insight
- Intuition
- Idea
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Zhuang Zhou
- On the Soul
- Language
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
- Painting
- Middle Ages
- Fiction
- Literature
- Mind
- Angel
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Social relation
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.