World Not of this World : The Reality of Images and Imagination

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.