Phenomenology of Productive Imagination: Embodiment, Language, Subjectivity

Saulius Geniusas, James Richard Mensch

• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Philosophy
• eBook ISBN:
  9783838297507

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 demonstrates unexpected ways in which phenomenology of productive imagination enriches our understanding of embodied subjectivity.

Table of contents

• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER I What is Productive Imagination? From Kant to Phenomenology
• CHAPTER II What is Productive about Reproductive Imagination? Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy and the Constitution of Cultural Worlds
• CHAPTER III Between Phenomenology, Pragmatism and Metaphysics: Max Scheler’s Concept of Productive Phantasy
• CHAPTER IV Between Phenomenology, Ontology and Philosophy of Culture:Productive Imagination and the Cassirer-Heidegger Disputation
• CHAPTER V From Phenomenology to the Kyoto School: Miki Kiyoshi and the Logic of Imagination
• CHAPTER VI From the Phenomenology of the Body to the Ontology of the Flesh: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Imagination
• CHAPTER VII From Phenomenology to Hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur’s Philosophy of Productive Imagination
• CHAPTER VIII From Jean-Paul Sartre to Paul Ricœur: Ricœur’s Lectures on Imagination Revisited
• CHAPTER IX Productive Imagination and Embodiment
• References