Platonism And The English Imagination

This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.

The ability to imagine is at the heart of what makes us human. Through our imagination we experience more fully the world both around us and within us. Imagination plays a key role in creativity and innovation. Until the seventeenth century, the human imagination was celebrated. Since then, with the emergence of science as the dominant worldview, imagination has been marginalised -- depicted as a way of escaping reality, rather than knowing it more profoundly -- and its significance to our humanity has been downplayed. Yet as we move further into the strange new dimensions of the twenty-first century, the need to regain this lost knowledge seems more necessary than ever before. This insightful and inspiring book argues that, for the sake of our future in the world, we must reclaim the ability to imagine and redress the balance of influence between imagination and science. Through the work of Owen Barfield, Goethe, Henry Corbin, Kathleen Raine, and others, and ranging from the teachings of ancient mystics to the latest developments in neuroscience, The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination draws us back to a philosophy and tradition that restores imagination to its rightful place, essential to our knowing reality to the full, and to our very humanity itself.

Presents what philosophical ethics can be like if freed from the idealizing and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory, making the case that moral imagination is a key part of human virtue by showing the variety of roles it plays in our practical and evaluative lives.

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, René Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike.

The imagination has been called, 'the principal organ for knowing and responding to disclosures of transcendent truth'. This book probes the theological sources of the imagination, which make it a vital tool for knowing and responding to such disclosures. Kerry Dearborn approaches areas of theology and imagination through a focus on the nineteenth century theologian and writer George MacDonald. MacDonald can be seen as an icon whose life and work open a window to the intersection of word, flesh and image. He communicated the gospel through narrative and image-rich forms which honour truth and address the intellectual, imaginative, spiritual, and emotional needs of his readers. MacDonald was also able to speak prophetically in a number of areas of contemporary concern, such as the nature of suffering, aging and death, environmental degradation, moral imagination and gender issues. Dearborn explores influences which shaped him, along with the wisdom he has offeredin the formation of significant Christian writers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Authors such as C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, W.H. Auden, Frederick Buechner and others attribute to MacDonald key paradigm shifts and insights in their own lives. A study of MacDonald does not offer a formulaic approach to theology and the imagination, but the possibility of gleaning from his rich harvest relevant nourishment for our own day. It also provides a context in which to assess potential weaknesses in imaginative approaches to theology.

This book examines the role Plato accords to imagination in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Claiming that the function of imagination evokes a realm of praxis within Plato's dialogues heretofore largely unrecognized, this book offers an interpretation of Plato that challenges the more orthodox view in which poetry and the arts are denigrated, and indeed, seen as eradicable from the dialogues altogether.

This book is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose); but it also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions it discusses are questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey the thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination from a closer point of view. How is it that imagination appears in literary art? Central topics of discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. Moreover, the similarities (both real and imagined) between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.