A World Not of This World - by Alfredo Ferrarin (Hardcover)

About the Book

In dialogue with thinkers from Aristotle to Freud, Alfredo Ferrarin provides a philosophical account of the nature of images and the imagination.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"In this brilliant and innovative book, Alfredo Ferrarin presents a novel conception of imagination. Through a series of masterful philosophical readings that venture into poetry, film, drama, geometry, and physics, he shows that imagination needs to be both reimagined and rethought, not only as a faculty concerned with images, but also as practical imagination, connected to desire and action, and, in this capacity, intrinsically related to thinking." --Dmitri Nikulin, Agnes Heller Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, USA

"Ferrarin's rich and rewarding book shows us how imagination permeates our world. It is filled with impressive scholarly erudition, precise phenomenological analyses, and often surprising insights. Written in an engaging prose the book is a paradigm of what it means to philosophize with imagination." --Eli Friedlander, Tel Aviv University, Israel

"This book is an ambitious and engaging work that deals with fundamental questions surrounding the nature of images and the imagination. The treatments of the relation between images and thought as well as the practical imagination are especially valuable for enriching the complexity of how images and the imagination play a varied role across the spectrum of human experience from perception to action to thinking. Ferrarin's vision will surely speak to a broad range of readers, and making an indispensable reference for any discussion of images and the imagination, given the originality of its argument and approach." --Nicolas de Warren, Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, Penn State University, USA

About the Author

Alfredo Ferrarin is Professor of Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. His previous titles include: Hegel and Aristotle (2001), The Powers of Pure Reason (2015) and Thinking and the I (2019).