A World Not of this World: The Reality of Images and Imagination [Hardcover]

Is an image merely an inferior copy of the actual thing? Is imagination simply an escape from reality? In both cases, Alfredo Ferrarin thinks not and, breaking classical assumptions that images are exclusively reproductions and imagination is a secondary faculty, this book provides a rich account of what images really are and what imagination can do.

Ferrarin begins by examining and disputing several commonplaces on images and imagination, both in everyday language and in many traditional philosophical approaches. With a lightness of touch throughout, he brings a broad range of thinkers into dialogue, from Aristotle, Kant, and Freud to Husserl, Wittgenstein, Sartre. He then proceeds to examine the twofold nature of every image  the image itself and what it is an image of  before distinguishing between natural, artificial, mental, and memory images. The final chapters probe the cognitive functions of imagination; the notions of fiction, play, and literary creation; and imagination in relation to praxis and the social world.

Comparing and relating how we conceptualize imagination to how we think about the concept of reality, Ferrarin contends that, whilst it can be, imagination is not always a flight from reality  it is also a way of figuring out what is real.

In dialogue with thinkers from Aristotle to Freud, Alfredo Ferrarin provides a philosophical account of the nature of images and the imagination.Alfredo Ferrarinis Professor of Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. His previous titles include: Hegel and Aristotle (2001), The Powers of Pure Reason (2015) and Thinking and the I (2019).

In this brilliant and innovative book, Alfredo Ferrarin presents a novel conception of imagination. Through a series of masterful philosophical readings that venture into poetry, film, drama, geometry, and physics, he shows that imagination needs to be both reimagined and rethought, not only as a faculty concerned witlÃ0