1. The Disenchanted World and the World of Experience 2. Imagination and Perception: The Productive and Reproductive Imagination 3. Imagination and Perception: The Absent Present and Bodily Synthesis 4. An 'Affective Logic' 5. Imaginary Institution(s) 6. Imaginary Selves 7. Bodily Imaginaries and the Flesh of Existence Afterword. Index
Biography
Kathleen Lennon is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and International Studies at the University of Hull, UK. Her most recent publications include the co- authored books The World the Flesh and the Subject (2005) and Theorizing Gender (2002), and the co-edited volume Embodied Selves(2013).
"...I take Lennon’s book to be an important addition to the philosophical literature, and she helps to advance our understanding of some difficult and often contested philosophical ter-rain. In the course of synthesizing a vast interdisciplinary collection of works relating to the imaginary, she presents a clear and careful picture of the imaginary and its role in our experience of the world." - Amy Kind, Claremont McKenna College, Mind
"Kathleen Lennon's new monograph joins a growing number of studies reclaiming the imagination from the dominance of a rationalist positivism. It marks the steps that have brought us toward modern concepts of the imagination, the Imaginary, and both body and social imaginaries… The book's strength is the clarity of the conceptual history it lays out as it illuminates the complexity and conceptual resonances of "the imaginary texture of real" (p. 3). " - Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Pennsylvania State University, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"At once accessible and substantial, Lennon's book ranges productively from Kant to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and on to psychoanalysis and critical social theory. Especially fruitful is the exploration of the common ground between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, a heritage that is too easily forgotten today, and the very productive links between the imaginary and affect, which make a strong contribution to contemporary debates on the affective turn." - Charles Shepherdson, University at Albany - State University of New York, USA
"Kathleen Lennon’s book Imagination and the Imaginary introduces the essentials on the history of the modern concept of imagination within phenomenology, supplemented by psychoanalysis and postmodern theories. Lennon provides a thorough examination of the different ways in which imagination, the imaginary, and the imaginings of the world have been articulated, and her book ought to be a primary steppingstone in any exploration of these concepts." - Anders Essom-Stenz and Tone Roald, University of Copenhagen
