2017-2018 Undergraduate Academic Catalogue 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 Undergraduate Academic Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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PL 409 - Creating the World: Theories of Imagination

(3.00 cr.)

Prerequisite: PL 201  and one additional PL 200-level course. Imagination has been variously conceived as a necessary aid to cognition (Aristotle), an "inferior kind of perceiving" (Berkeley), a "blind but indispensable function of the soul" (Kant), and "reason in its most exalted form" (Wordsworth). In this seminar, students investigate the history of the concept of imagination, with particular attention given to the philosophical significance of shifts in its characterization and its role in our contemporary self-understanding. Which kinds of human cognition are imaginative and in exactly what sense? How have our imaginative capacities been theorized in relation to reason and emotion? And, what roles do these capacities play in cognition, poetic practices, and moral agency? The very pursuit of answers to these questions requires intellectual imagination, as no single framework or method provides all of the resources needed to think expansively about the nature of the mind and its relationship to the world.



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