Palermo

Journal of Tourism History

The books in this series explore the relations, in human social and cultural life, between perception, creativity and skill. Their common aim is to move beyond established approaches in anthropology and material culture studies that treat the inhabited world as a repository of complete objects, already present and available for analysis. Instead these works focus on the creative processes that continually bring these objects into being, along with the persons in whose lives they are entangled. All creative activities entail movement or gesture, and the books in this series are particularly concerned to understand the relations between these creative movements and the inscriptions they yield. Likewise in considering the histories of artefacts, these studies foreground the skills of their makers-cum-users, and the transformations that ensue, rather than tracking their incorporation as finished objects within networks of interpersonal relations. The books in this series will be interdisciplinary in orientation, their concern being always with the practice of interdisciplinarity: on ways of doing anthropology with other disciplines, rather than doing an anthropology of these subjects. Through this anthropology with, they aim to achieve an understanding that is at once holistic and processual, dedicated not so much to the achievement of a final synthesis as to opening up lines of inquiry.

Phainomena, 2022

Syllabus for an MA-level course taught at the University of Geneva in 2020

Imagination is one of the most philosophically interesting faculties that humans have, as well as one of the least well-understood. It is difficult to define, yet it facilitates our interactions with the past, the future, the possible, the fictional, and the actual. In this course we will consider a number of issues related to the philosophy of imagination, including topics in the history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and cognitive science.

Moral Imagination in Jose Saramago's Work, 2015

Imagination, what can I say about it? My books show that I have imagination. But it is a fantasy that always serves a reason. Or rather: accepts the superiority of reason. My books are characterized by strong imagination but are constantly used rationally. I can put it this way: Imagination is the starting point, but later it belongs to reason. 1 My work is based on an attempt to show that there is no difference between imagination and life. Life can be imaginary and vice versa. 2 This chapter aims to present the theories of imagination and moral imagination to prepare the foundation for the following chapters of the book in which I will present examples of ethical issues that arise in the work of José Saramago, and claim that they develop ethical sensitivity.

Columbia University Press, 2018

Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement. The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.

Campagnaro M (2017). Bruno Munari’s visual mapping of the city of Milan: A historical analysis of the picturebook Nella nebbia di Milano. In: (a cura di): Goga N, Kümmerling-Meibauer B., Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature. Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes. p. 147-163, AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA:John Benjamins Publishing Company, ISBN: 978 90 272 0161 4, doi: doi 10.1075/clcc.7.09cam Abstract Bruno Munari was one of the most pioneering and ingenious thinkers of the twentieth century. Pablo Picasso called him “the new Leonardo” and Pierre Restany “the Leonardo and the Peter Pan of Italian design.” During his long career as an artist and a designer, Bruno Munari achieved a special bond with the infant universe. He explored the area of visual narration in children’s literature with sublime results. Munari’s witty picturebooks pay special attention to young readers’ capacity to organize and orientate their reading experience by means of visible and invisible details. This chapter examines the picturebook Nella nebbia di Milano (the Circus in the Mist, 1968). The aim of the chapter is to provide an overview of Munari’s original approach and of his capacity to visualize and map places in children’s everyday lives.

My paper will discuss the ontological implications of recent developments in Western philosophy of the notion of the imagination’s creativity in the collective sphere in terms of the social imaginary as noticeable in Paul Ricoeur, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Charles Taylor; the contributions two twentieth century Japanese philosophers, Miki Kiyoshi and Nakamura Yūjirō, make in this regard; and a possible ontology of the imagination one might be able to draw from the above. Miki shows a connection between the imagination and a certain form-formlessness dynamic he inherits from Nishida Kitarō’s theory of place that Nishida had characterized in terms of a self-forming formlessness. Nakamura—taking off from Miki’s attempts to concretize Nishida’s theory of place in terms of the creative imagination—in turn points back to that connection between imagination and place and explicates it via his development of the Aristotelian notion of common sense (koinē aisthēsis, sensus communis). Such developments of the imagination’s creativity in the collective sphere and also in terms of “common sense” is reminiscent of the more recent Western developments of the notion of the notion of the social imaginary or social imagination as found in Ricoeur, Castoriadis, and Taylor, and in particular Castoriadis develops an ontology of the creativity involved in the imagination. Recalling the fact that Nishida was inspired by the Greek notion of chōra in developing his theory of place, I then suggest that the linking of the imagination with the process of the forming of the formless as well as with place may allow us in turn to understand the imagination in the Greek ontological terms of chōrismos—etymologically related to chōra—as the difference that brings order to chaos by allotting beings, each to its own place. Imagination as Ein-bildung might then be viewed as the ontological formation that, through differentiation, gives shape, form, to place.

Wenn ihr's nicht fühlt, ihr werdet's nicht erjagen J.W. Goethe, Faust I [If you don't feel it, you won't catch it]