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Traces the concept of the imagination through German idealism of the 18th century, the American philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the findings of contemporary cognitive neuroscience in order to argue for the centrality of aesthetics in human cognition.
John Kaag is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His most recent book, Thinking Through the Imagination, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. He has held academic appointments at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Harvard University.
Robert Neville:John Kaag’s Thinking through the Imagination is a uniquely important contribution to the philosophy of imagination in at least six ways. First, it is the most comprehensive and detailed study ever of Charles S. Peirce’s theory of imagination, although scholars have long recognized the importance of Peirce on this topic; this book is state of the art in Peirce scholarship. Second, it resets the philosophic discussion of imagination to a new default position, that of the American pragmatic tradition rather than the Kantian tradition, both of which Kaag discusses in detail. Third, although Kaag is primarily a philosopher setting forth his own position on imagination, he is also a careful historian of philosophy, working with letters and unpublished material as well as standard texts, and therefore speaks with full authority on the historical material of pragmatism and its relation to European philosophy. Fourth, he shows why Peirce is the pragmatist to watch on the subject of imagination, despite the greater fame of William James and John Dewey on the subject. Sixth, he is exactly right to place all this discussion in close connection with the studies of imagination in contemporary cognitive science, showing on the one hand that philosophers should have been following this science as Peirce would have done all along and on the other that cognitive scientists should have been learning from Peirce and the other pragmatists. This is a splendid contribution, not to be ignored by cognitive scientists, scholars of American philosophy, and philosophers and critics interested in imagination.
—Michael L. Raposa:This important book deserves a wide audience, and should be of interest to scholars working on a variety of topics. Kaag effectively exposes the Kantian roots of pragmatism, especially the link between Kant and Peirce. Against that background he articulates a pragmatic theory of the imagination that underscores its character both as fully embodied and as vitally central to human cognition and inquiry. Kaag’s own insightful account plays out in a conceptual space far removed from the dangerous extremes of either biological reductionism or what he himself labels a 'naive panpsychism.' The result is really quite impressive, a virtuoso philosophical performance.
—Roger A. Ward:This book is a giant step forward in understanding the interplay between imagination and inquiry in Peirce. Kaag brilliantly illuminates the influence of Kant's aesthetics and imagination for Peirce through Schiller with a discussion that ranges over literary analysis and cognitive and neural science as ways of explicating Peirce's logic and existential graphing. This is one of the best examples I know of handling Peirce's texts with both historical perspicuity and speculative insight.
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