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1 results

  • 5 - Philosophical Perspectives on Imagination in the Western Tradition

  • from Part I - Theoretical Perspectives on the Imagination
  • Edited by Anna Abraham, University of Georgia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination
    Published online:
    26 May 2020
    Print publication:
    18 June 2020, pp 64-79

  • Summary

    Philosophers in the Western tradition have both theorized about imagination and used imagination in their theorizing about other matters. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of philosophical theorizing about imagination with a special focus on its relation to other mental states such as belief and perception. I then turn to a discussion of the methodological role that imagination has played in philosophy. I here focus on the imaginability principle, i.e. the claim that the imaginability of a given scenario entails that such a scenario is in some sense possible. Relying on this kind of principle, philosophers have used imagination to justify theories in domains such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics.