Seeing More Kant's Theory of Imagination

Samantha Matherne defends a systematic interpretation of the philosopher Immanuel Kants theory of imagination. In contrast with more traditional theories of imagination, as a kind of fantasy that we exercise only in relation to objects that are not real or not present, Matherne argues that Kant theorizes imagination as something that we exercise just as much in relation to objects that are real and present. In short, she attributes to Kant a view of imagining as something that pervades our lives. In order to bring out this pervasiveness, Matherne offers an account of what kind of mental capacity Kant takes imagination to be in general. She then explores Kants picture of how we exercise our imagination in perception, ordinary experience, the appreciation of beauty and sublimity, the production of art, the pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit of morality. However, she makes the case that Kants analysis of this wide range of phenomena is underwritten by a unified theory of what imagination is, as a remarkably flexible cognitive capacity that we can exercise in constrained and creative, playful and serious ways.

1 - Imagination as a Cognitive Capacity
2 - Imagination and the Two Stems of Cognition
3 - Imagination Is Part of Sensibility
4 - Three Definitions of Imagination
5 - Empirical Imagination in Perception and Experience
6 - A Priori Imagination and the Conditions of Experience I: The Transcendental Deduction
7 - A Priori Imagination and the Conditions of Experience II: The Schematism
8 - Imagination and the Appreciation of Beauty
9 - Artistic Imagination
10 - Imagination and the Sublime
11 - The Possibility of Moral Imagination
12 - Imaginative Sight and the Faculty of Desire
13 - Imaginative Exhibition in Morality

Samantha Matherne is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of Humanities in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University. She is the author of Cassirer for the Routledge Philosophers Series and one of the authors of The Geography of Taste, along with Dominic McIver Lopes, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay (OUP 2024). She is the editor of the first English translation of the work of the German philosopher, Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Essays on Art, Aesthetics, and Value, translated by Daniel Dahlstrom (in Oxford's New History of Philosophy Series, 2023). She has also published articles on Immanuel Kant, Post-Kantian traditions, and Aesthetics.