Although productive imagination has played a highly significant role in (post-) Kantian philosophy, there have been very few book-length studies explicitly dedicated to its analysis. In his new book, Saulius Geniusas develops a phenomenology of productive imagination while relying on those resources that we come across in Edmund Husserl’s, Max Scheler’s, Martin Heidegger’s, Ernst Cassirer’s, Miki Kiyoshi’s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s, and Paul Ricoeur’s writings, while also engaging in present-day philosophical discussions of the imagination. Investigating the relation between imagination and embodiment, affectivity, perception, language, selfhood, and intersubjectivity, the book provides a phenomenological conception of productive imagination, which is committed to basic phenomenological principles and which is sensitive to how productive imagination has been conceptualized in the history of phenomenology. Against such a background, Geniusas develops a new conception of productive imagination: It is a basic modality of intentionality that indirectly shapes the human experience of the world by forming the contours of action, intuition, knowledge, and understanding. It is not so much a blind and indispensable function of the soul, but an art concealed in the body, for it springs out of instincts, drives, desires, and needs. The author discloses the unexpected ways in which phenomenology of productive imagination enriches our understanding of embodied subjectivity.

Phenomenology is one of the most pervasive and influential schools of thought in twentieth-century European philosophy. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the idea of the imagination in Husserl and Heidegger. The author also locates phenomenology within the broader context of a philosophical world dominated by Kantian thought, arguing that the location of Husserl within the Kantian landscape is essential to an adequate understanding of phenomenology both as an historical event and as a legacy for present and future philosophy.

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. The volume offers both a thematic and a historical overview of productive imagination understood as Kant originally wanted us to understand it.

The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary, Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us. Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and imagination and, drawing on Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, explores some fundamental questions, such as whether there is a distinction between the perceived and the imagined; the relationship between imagination and creativity; and the role of the body in perception and imagination. Invoking also Spinoza and Coleridge, Lennon argues that, far from being a realm of illusion, the imaginary world is our most direct mode of perception. She then explores the role the imaginary plays in the formation of the self and the social world. A unique feature of the volume is that it compares and contrasts a philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination - running from Kant and Hume to Strawson and John McDowell - with the work of phenomenological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Castoriadis, Irigaray, Gatens and Lloyd. This makes Imagination and the Imaginary essential reading for students and scholars working in phenomenology, philosophy of perception, social theory, cultural studies and aesthetics. Cover Image: Bronze Bowl with Lace, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, 2014. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Lelong and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo Jonty Wilde.

Is there any justification for Heidegger's famous 'violence' against Kant's philosophy? An independent assessment of the worth of Heidegger's argument is also made all the more pertinent by the evident misgivings Heidegger had about his interpretation of Kant. We must ask of Heidegger's interpretation of Kant: 1) Is this good Kant? and 2) Is this good Heidegger?

Explores imagination and human rationality in a crucial period of philosophy, from hermeneutics and transcendental logic to ethics and aesthetics.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.