Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Kind
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Way

Imagination is a speculative mental state that allows us to consider situations apart from the here and now. Historically, imagination played an important role in the works of many of the major philosophical figures in the Western tradition – from Aristotle to Descartes to Hume to Kant. By the middle of the twentieth century, in the wake of the behavioristic mindset that had dominated both psychology and philosophy in the early part of the century, imagination had largely faded from philosophical view and received scant attention from the 1960s through the 1980s. But imagination returned to the limelight in the late twentieth century, as it was given increasing prominence in both aesthetics and philosophy of mind. In aesthetics, interest in imagination derives in large part from its role in our engagement with works of art, music, and literature. For example, some philosophers have called upon imagination to capture the essence of fiction, while others have called upon it to explain how listeners understand the expressive nature of musical works. Yet others have seen imagination as centrally involved in ontological questions about art; in particular, they take works of art to be best understood as in some sense imaginary objects. In philosophy of mind, imagination plays an especially important role in discussions of mindreading, that is, our ability to understand the mental states of others. While theory theorists claim that we do this by calling upon a folk theory of mind, simulation theorists claim that we mindread by simulating the mental states of others – with simulation typically cashed out in terms of imagination. More generally, philosophers of mind who are interested in questions of cognitive architecture tend to be especially interested in imagination and its relationship to belief and desire. In fact, imagination has come to play an important role in a wide variety of philosophical contexts in addition to aesthetics and philosophy of mind. It has traditionally been central to discussions of thought experimentation and modal epistemology, where an analogy is often drawn between the way perception justifies beliefs about actuality and the way imagination seems to justify beliefs about possibility. Imagination has also been invoked to explain pretence, dreaming, empathy, delusion, and our ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning.

scholarly journals Kant, the Philosophy of Mind, and Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil Gomes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Wilfrid Sellars ◽  
Critical Writings ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides a background to the essays in Kant and the Philosophy of Mind. In the first part of the chapter, some of the issues in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant’s Critical writings are summarised. The second part charts some of the ways in which that discussion influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind, with particular focus on the way in which Kant’s writings were taken up in the work of Wilfrid Sellars and P.F. Strawson. Finally, some of the themes which characterise Kantian approaches in the philosophy of mind are identified.

Naturalizzazione, mente e conoscenza

2009 ◽  
pp. 151-186
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Zanet
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Naturalized Epistemology ◽  
Anomalous Monism ◽  
Proper Consideration ◽  
The Way

- A controversial issue regarding Quine's naturalised epistemology is that it may involve some form of reductionism. This article focuses on one of these forms, analysing the interplay of his philosophy of mind and epistemology. It aims to show that if we take into proper consideration the way in which the version of anomalous monism embraced affects his conception of mental states like sensations and propositional attitudes, Quine's philosophy of mind should be regarded as anti-reductionist. Through a discussion of his theory of perception, I try to argue that what is entailed by it is, in a sense only partially accepted by Quine himself, that neither perception nor observational language can be strictly reduced to their stimulatory conditions. By pointing out the relevance that Quine attributes to the mechanism of empathy as a means for ascribing propositional attitudes, a further interesting argument is provided to underline that, within a naturalized epistemology, there is room for a non-reductive description of mind in some ways close to the results of the hermeneutic tradition.

Utopian Landscapes and Ecstatic Journeys: Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, and Mircea Eliade on the Terror of Modernity

Numen ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
Kocku von Stuckrad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Hermann Hesse ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
Conditio Humana ◽  
Modern Condition

AbstractAgainst the background of fascism and the disasters of two world wars, during the first decades of the twentieth century many European intellectuals were formulating negative responses to “modernity” and to what they regarded as the decline of human civilization. Often, these intellectuals sought for alternatives to the modern conditio humana and looked for solutions in religion, art, or philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the Dionysian and the Orphic is of particular importance for such a discourse of modernity. After introducing Nietzsche’s contribution as a referential framework, the article compares two representatives of this intellectual discourse: Hermann Hesse and Mircea Eliade. At first glance, Hesse, the writer and poet, does not seem to have much in common with Eliade, the scholar of religion and writer of novels. Upon closer examination, however, there are remarkable similarities in their work and their evaluation of the modern human condition. For Hesse, it was art, music, and literature that provided the antidote against the predicaments of modern culture. Eliade shared Hesse’s search for an alternative to the modern condition and found it in the pure religion outside of time and space, in the illud tempus of the homo religiosus. For him, it was shamanism in particular that provided a model for a contact with the absolute world of truth untouched by the “terror of history.” The article argues that these dialectical responses are part and parcel of the project of European “modernity” itself, rather than representing an “anti-modern” claim.

Japan's Early Twentieth-Century Violin Boom

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mehl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
The 1960S

‘Invasion from the Orient’; ‘Young Violinists from Asia Gain Major Place on American Musical Scene’; ‘Suzuki's Pupils Learn Music First’: in the 1960s, headlines such as these drew attention to how successfully Asians had made Western art music their own; violinists from Japan were among the first. Observers have speculated on the reasons, but few know enough about Japanese history to realize that the phenomenon had its roots in developments during the Meiji period (1868–1912).

Reading One's Own Mind: Self-Awareness and Developmental Psychology

2004 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 297-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Nichols ◽  
Stephen Stich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Way

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Studying Modern Arabic Literature

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Modern Arabic

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

Lyric Cousins

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Early History ◽  
Sight Reading ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Way

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.

Formative Influences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Christian Metz ◽  
The Way

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.

Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Garden City ◽  
New Town ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Body ◽  
Practical Level ◽  
The Way

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.

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