PHILOSOPHY OF THE IMAGINATION

Numerous thoughts are possible illustrating the use of the imagination in creating philosophy. Thoughts about conjunctions, existences, attributions, and trivializations are just the beginning of this type of study. One can imagine many different properties, ideologies, systems, and discretions which go along with the philosophical imagination. Specifically, one might think about the complexity and perfection of objects which exist in imaginative space. One might distinguish between thoughts which exist ‘as-thought’ and thoughts which to some degree have their own independent reality. One can speak of imagination in the sense that is ‘as-real-as-thought’ and the sense that is ‘trivialized’ or ‘less-real-than-thought’. One can even debate what properties constitute an idea in its ‘being-as-real-as-thought’. Also, specific thoughts might exist in the realm of imagination which are seen to be real-qua-philosophy, rather than mereologically real. This may involve finding a specific relevance of imagination to philosophy, such as through its relevance to logic, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, feminism, or race. A made-up concept such as a ’dreambling’ might have multiple imaginative properties, thus extending the concept into the perspectival, dimensional space of philosophy. The dreambling may have the properties of being an entity as well as being a dream. Other similarly fanciful concepts are also imaginable. One may also think of concepts which are mostly philosophical such as pure logical or political concepts, and frame them in such a way where they have a small touch of imagination. In that case, the rhetorical, personal, ideological, or psychological property of imagination has been granted to a philosophical entity. Imagination can be seen as a way of breathing life into concepts that had been considered redundant, irrelevant, or compromised. Thus, imagination has a prospective role in philosophy, and vice versa.

From The Dimensional Phenomenologist's Toolkit, scheduled to be published by January 2016.