Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (Social Imaginaries)

How has the concept of productive imagination been developed in post-Kantian philosophy? This important and innovative volume explores this question, with particular focus on hermeneutics, phenomenology and neo-Kantianism. The essays in this collection demonstrate that imagination is productive not only because it fabricates non-existent objects, but also because it shapes human experience and co-determines the meaning of the experienced world. The authors show how imagination forms experience at the kinaesthetic, pre-linguistic, poetic, historical, artistic, social and political levels, focussing on the following concepts: - how imagination generates symbols in modernity, which inform the prevalent political and social concepts; - the role that poetic, historical and generative imagination plays in human sciences; - how imagination regulates experience and provides intuitive boundaries for experience; - the function of productive imagination in the formation of symbolic forms; - how productive imagination transfigures our perceptual relation to the world; - its significance for social creativity; - its ethical significance in light of the current immigration crisis; - its essential function at the levels of pre-linguistic thinking - the role of kinaesthetic imagination. The volume offers both a thematic and a historical overview of productive imagination understood as Kant originally wanted us to understand it.