200 Pages
    by Routledge

    200 Pages
    by Routledge

    Pulling together a collection of richly informative essays Rethinking Imagination addresses competing sets of ideas, oscillating between the modern and post-modern, creativity and sublimity, progress and apocalypse, democracy and redemption Enlightenment and Romanticism and reason and imagination.

    Aiming to thematise these debates from the perspective of the imagination, Rethinking Imagination takes two directions. The first addresses a socio-cultural interpretation in which the distinguishing figures of modernity can be viewed as continuing differentiation and autonomatization of spheres and systems that goes well beyond the divisions of labour. The second is an ongoing philosophical discourse about the imagination and its relation to reason which has been present since Enlightenment.

    Divided into two separate yet interconnected parts, this book is a highly significant collection of essays and a valuable contribution to the field of philosophical and socio-cultural sociology. It is a key book for undergraduate, postgraduate and academic researchers.

    Preface; Introduction, John Rundell; Part I Decentring society, recentring the subject; Chapter 1 A society of culture: the constitution of modernity, Gyorgy Markus; Chapter 2 The Apocalyptic imagination and the inability to mourn, Martin Jay; Chapter 3 The elementary ethics of everyday life, Agnes Heller; Chapter 4 European rationality, Niklas Luhmann; Part II Creating imagination; Chapter 5 Creativity and judgement: Kant on reason and imagination, John Rundell; Chapter 6 Imagination in discourse and in action, Paul Ricoeur; Chapter 7 Radical imagination and the social instituting imaginary, Cornelius Castoriadis; Chapter 8 Reason, imagination, interpretation, Johann P. Arnason; epilogue Sublime theories: reason and imagination in modernity, David Roberts;

    Biography

    Gillian Robinson lectures in Politics at Deakin University
    John Rundell is Ashworth Lecturer in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne.