Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe. It provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. It enables creation of new things that the world has never seen. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? The ten original essays in Knowledge Through Imagination, along with a substantial introduction by the editors, grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Many of the essays proceed by considering specific domains of inquiry where imagination is often employed--from the navigation of our immediate environment, to the prediction of our own and other peoples' behavior, to the investigation of ethical truth. Other essays assess the prospects for knowledge through imagination from a more general perspective, looking at issues of cognitive architecture and basic rationality. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination.

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe. It provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. It enables creation of new things that the world has never seen. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live—whether we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? The ten original essays in Knowledge Through Imagination, along with a substantial introduction by the editors, grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Many of the essays proceed by considering specific domains of inquiry where imagination is often employed—from the navigation of our immediate environment, to the prediction of our own and other peoples' behavior, to the investigation of ethical truth. Other essays assess the prospects for knowledge through imagination from a more general perspective, looking at issues of cognitive architecture and basic rationality. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination.

This book proposes a new and systematic interpretation of the mental nature, function and structure, and importance of the imagination in Book 1, 'Of the Understanding', of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The proposed interpretation has deeply revisionary implications for Hume's philosophy of mind and for his naturalism, epistemology, and stance to scepticism. The book remedies a surprising blindspot in Hume scholarship and contributes to the current, lively philosophical debate on imagination. Hume's philosophy, if rightly understood, gives suggestions about how to treat imagination as a mental natural kind, its cognitive complexity and variety of functions notwithstanding. Hume's imagination is a faculty of inference and the source of a distinctive kind of idea, which complements our sensible representations of objects. Our cognitive nature, if restricted to the representation of objects and of their relations, would leave ordinary and philosophical cognition seriously underdetermined and expose us to scepticism. Only the non-representational, inferential faculty of the imagination can put in place and vindicate ideas like causation, body, and self, which support our cognitive practices. The book reconstructs how Hume's naturalist inferentialism about the imagination develops this fundamental insight. Its five parts deal with the dualism of representation and inference; the explanation of generality and modality; the production of causal ideas; the production of spatial and temporal content, and the distinction of an external world of bodies and an internal one of selves; and the replacement of the understanding with imagination in the analysis of cognition and in epistemology.

This edited book explores the application of Jungian perspectives in educational settings.

What is the role and value of virtue, emotion and imagination in law and legal reasoning? These new essays, by leading scholars of both law and philosophy, offer striking and exploratory answers to this neglected question. The collection takes a holistic approach, inquiring as to the connections and relations between virtue, emotion and imagination. In addition to the principal focus on adjudication, essays in the collection also engage with a variety of different legal, political and moral contexts: eg criminal law sentencing, the Black Lives Matter movement and professional ethics. A number of different areas of the law are addressed (eg criminal law, constitutional law and tort law) and the issues explored include: the benefits and limits of empathy in legal reasoning; the role of attention and perception in judicial reasoning;, the identification of judicial virtues (such as compassion and humility) and judicial vices (such as callousness and partiality); the values and dangers of certain imaginative devices (eg personification); and the interactive and social dimensions of virtue, emotion and imagination.

Inspired by papers developed for the 6th International Conference on Imagination and Education: Imaginative Practice, Imaginative Inquiry (Canberra, Australia, 2008), this book connects a cross-section of educators, researchers and administrators in a dialogue and exploration of imaginative and creative ways of teaching, learning and conducting educational inquiry. Imagination is a concept that spans traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries. The authors in this book acknowledge diverse theoretical and practical allegiances, but they concur that imagination will play an essential role in the building of new foundations for education in the 21st century. From our conception of human development through our ways of educating teachers to the teaching of mathematics, they argue for the centrality of imagination in the realization of human potential, and for its relevance to the most urgent problems confronting our world. Introduced by a wide-ranging literature review and extensively referenced, this volume makes an important contribution to a rapidly expanding field.

Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience offers a comprehensive treatment of the human imagination by integrating the rich discourse on imagination in the humanities with modern neuroscientific research. This book is the first to offer an integrated understanding of imagination from both a humanistic (i.e., historical, philosophical, cultural, depth psychological) and scientific perspective. The book presents neurobiological accounts that align with prominent theories in Jungian and archetypal psychology and offers a window into the many ways imagination can be understood. It elaborates on the discourse on imagination in Western civilization that goes back thousands of years. Chapters analyze how imagination has been considered throughout history and contrasts a modern neuroscientific approach that looks at imagination by studying its component parts without addressing the phenomenon in all its experiential richness and complexity. By bringing these two approaches together an account of the human imagination emerges that is grounded in scientific rigor without diminishing the fullness of human experience. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian studies, and psychotherapy

The educational imagination is the capacity to think critically beyond our located, daily experiences of education. It breaks away from the immediacy of personal understanding by placing education within wider, deeper and longer contexts. Boundaries of the Educational Imagination develops the educational imagination by answering six questions: What happens when we expand continuously outwards from one school to all the schools of the world?; What happens if we go inside a school and explore how its material equipment has changed over the past 300 years?; What is the smallest educational unit in our brain and how does it allow an almost infinite expansion of knowledge?; What is the highest level of individual development we can teach students to aspire towards?; What role does education play in a world that is producing more and more complex knowledge increasingly quickly?; How do small knowledge elements combine to produce increasingly complex knowledge forms? Each question goes on a journey towards limit points in education so that educational processes can be placed within a bigger framework that allows new possibilities, fresh options and more critical engagement. These questions are then pulled together into a structuring framework enabling the reader to grasp how this complex subject works.

Young people learn most readily when their imaginations are engaged and teachers teach most successfully when they are able to see their subject matter from their pupils' point of view. It is, however, difficult to define imagination in practice and even more difficult to make full use of its potential. In this original and stimulating book, Kieran Egan, winner of the prestigous Grawemeyer award for education in 1991, discusses what imagination really means for children and young people in the middle years and what its place should be in the midst of the normal demands of classroom teaching and learning. Egan uses a bright and witty style to move from a brief history of the ways in which imagination has been regarded over the years, through a general discussion of the links between learning and imagination. A selection of sample lesson plans show teachers how they can encourage effective learning through stimulating pupils' imaginations in a variety of curriculum areas, including maths, science, social studies and language work.

Imagination for Inclusion offers a reconsideration of the ways in which imagination engages and empowers learners across the education spectrum, from primary to adult levels and in all subject areas. Imagination as a natural, expedient, and exciting learning tool should be central to any approach to developing and implementing curriculum, but is increasingly undervalued as learners progress through the education system; this disregards not only imagination’s potential, but its paramount place in informing truly inclusive approaches to teaching and learning. This book presents a new theory of imagination and includes discussion about its application to teaching and learning to increase the engagement of disaffected students and reinvigorate their relationships with curriculum content. Chapters include key ideas and discussion surrounding the benefits of introducing imaginative practices into the classroom for learners from a range of marginalised backgrounds, such as young people with disabilities and adult learners from socio-economically disadvantaged environments. In exploring imagination in the practice of inclusive education, the book includes chapters from researchers and practitioners in education who have fresh ideas about how learners and teachers have benefited from introducing imaginative pedagogies. The diverse collection, featuring writers with backgrounds from early childhood to adult education, will be essential reading for academics and researchers in the fields of education, inclusive education, social policy, professional development, teacher education and creativity. It will be of particular interest to current and pre-service teachers who want to develop inclusive practice and increase the engagement of all students with formal education.