1 Imagination Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity. (Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 125, 28 May 1751) In much of western thought, the imagination has an ambiguous status, seemingly poised between spirit and nature, m
Introduction This unit investigates certain philosophical issues concerning imagination, creativity and the relationships between them, and considers the conceptions and varieties of imaginative experience. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Thought and experience: themes in the philosophy of mind (AA308).
Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Robert Philip
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3.4 Strawson: Section VI There is only one more section left in the paper. Here, as we would expect, Strawson returns to the way in which he set out the problem (in II:4) and makes good his promise to ‘[give] the optimist something more to say’. 1 Learning Latin The aim of this unit is to enable you to get started in Latin in a fairly leisurely but well-focused way. The material has been developed in response to requests from students who had had no contact with Latin before and who felt they would like to spend a little time preparing for the kind of learning which takes place on a language course – and, in particular, on a classical language course. If you have taken Classical Studies courses in the Open University or elsewhere, you will be 8.2 The increasing status of feeling Although the Enlightenment advocated the rigorous use of reason as the main means of achieving progress, some of its major thinkers also recognised the role of feeling or emotion, particularly in moral matters. Chief among these was Rousseau. He felt that ‘inner sentiment’ played an important part in matters of conscience and of religious faith, as well as in human relations. By ‘sentiment’ he meant everything embracing intuition (a word rarely used in the eighteenth century) and emot 4.3 Responses to religion Reasoned responses to religion could take many forms. It was rare for writers to profess outright atheism; even in those cases where we may suspect authors of holding this view, censorship laws made their public expression unlawful. These laws were particularly stringent in France. In many cases reasoned critique was applied to the practices of institutional religion, such as the corruption of the clergy or the rituals of worship, rather than to more fundamental matters of doctrine or faith. 4.2 Materialism Increasingly, particularly in late Enlightenment texts, this confidence in our ability to discover and apply clear moral distinctions came into conflict with an alternative view of human nature and morality derived from philosophical materialism, which was particularly influential in France. To a materialist everything, from our nervous system and reflex actions to our innermost thoughts and most ‘mystical’ beliefs, was susceptible to examination by the physical sciences; our thoughts and 4.1 Constant human nature Just as with other natural phenomena, Enlightenment thinkers came to the conclusion as a result of observation that human nature itself was a basic constant. In other words, it possessed common characteristics and was subject to universal, verifiable laws of cause and effect. As Hume put it: Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. 5.2 Free verse Although we can't make rules about what constitutes a poem, we can see that even when writing free verse, where lines and line-breaks may be irregular, form is still important. Free verse still makes use of technical effects: rhythms, grammatical structures, sound effects, etc. Also, it invariably still makes grammatical sense. Free verse, with its infinite elasticity, can recreate form anew in each poem, inventing a one-off organising principle which explains that particular poem. 4 Impersonation and imagination Listen to Track 3, where Jackie Kay, Paul Muldoon and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze talk about the importance of autobiography to their poems as well as the importance of using the imagination to harness other people's voices. 2 Forming the form By and large, readers tend to agree whether a poem ‘works’ or not, even if it's not clear how or why it works. The best poems retain a certain mystery, but subsequent analysis invariably reveals various techniques the writer has employed to key into this commonality. The form a poem takes, whether it be free or traditional, reflects those techniques, and is itself vital in the unlocking of ‘the logic of the imagination’. The form a poet chooses for any one poem is partly Learning outcomes By the end of your study of this unit, you should have: an understanding of the common techniques underlying free verse and traditional forms of poetry; begun to identify aspects of your own experience and imagination that you can use when writing poems; learnt the basic terminology and practical elements of poetry. Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions)
This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have: an understanding of ‘texts’ that is not restricted to the written word; an understanding of war memorials as text; a basic ability to interpret a visual text. 6 Personal response to a memorial But, you may be thinking, all our agreement up to now has shown that these perceptions and assumptions come from a common understanding of the appropriate form and meaning of a war memorial. Where, might you ask, does personal response come in? Are we not individuals who have different ways of looking at artefacts and of deciding what – if anything – they mean? This question opens up a big area of discussion, one which will be taken up many times later. Clearly, as individuals, we m Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have: an awareness of the processes of study in the arts and humanities an understanding of key concepts in the arts and humanities. References 4.3 The easy problems and the hard problem What implications do naturalism and strong naturalism have for the study of the mind? There are two. First, naturalists will deny the existence of souls, spirits and other psychic phenomena and maintain that the mind is part of the natural world, subject to natural laws. This view is shared by most modern philosophers of mind. Secondly, strong naturalists will hold that mental phenomena can be reductively explained in terms of processes in the brain, which can themselves be explained i 4.2 Naturalism and reductive explanation There is a widespread commitment among contemporary philosophers and scientists to a naturalistic view of the world. In broad terms, naturalism is the view that everything is scientifically explicable – to put it crudely, that there are no miracles. (Note that I am using ‘naturalism’ here for a metaphysical position – a view about the nature of the world. It is also used for a methodological position – a view about how the world, or some aspect of it, should be
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Activity 5
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