Apologetics
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 60, No. 2 – Spring 2018
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
Edited by Amy Kind. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 481 pages. Hardcover, $192.00.
There has been a renewed interest of late in the role of imagination in art, theology, and ministry. Christians who are artistic are rightfully pressing the centrality of the imagination as a guide on the quest for beauty. Christian intellectuals such as Kevin Vanhoozer, James Smith, and Holly Ordway have highlighted the role of imagination in theology, spiritual formation, and apologetics. Pastors such as Timothy Keller urge greater attention to the imagination in preaching. Given its centrality in much of human life—including perceiving, learning, creating, and moralizing—acquaintance with the nature and role of the imagination is welcome and needed within the Christian community. Rigor and clarity is also needed. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination is well-placed to be a helpful guide in understanding the contours of image, imagination, and the imaginary.
The handbook, at nearly 500 pages, is not for the faint of heart. However, each of the six sections and chapters within (34 total chapters) serve as accessible stand-alone pieces on some facet of the imaginative life. The introduction by editor Amy Kind offers a taxonomy of the imagination serving as a useful framework for the essays that follow.
Part 1 explicates six historically prominent philosophers—Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre—and their philosophy of imagination. The selection of philosophers seems ad hoc—Descartes and Husserl perhaps—and other important thinkers on the imagination, such as Plato and Coleridge (albeit not a philosopher), were noticeably absent from the discussion. Still, these historical treatments offer the reader needed context for the discussion to follow.
Part 2, “Contemporary Discussions of Imagination,” explores whether acts of imagining always include sensory mental images (chapter 7), whether imagination is fundamentally similar or different than belief (chapter 8), how imagination and perception interact (chapter 9), how imagination and memory are similar and different (chapter 10), whether dreaming states are exercises in hallucination or imagination (chapter 11), and whether attitudinal imaginings (imagining that p) can also take a desire-like form (chapter 12). One is struck, in considering the wide range of issues discussed in this section, with the versatility and centrality of imagination to the cognitive life. Man truly is Homo imaginans, as the philosopher Colin McGinn provocatively suggests in his book Mindsight.
Part 3, “Imagination in Aesthetics,” explores the role of imagination in art, music, and fiction. In this section, Stacie Friend’s essay entitled “Fiction and Emotion” (chapter 16) is especially insightful, explaining how it is that we imaginatively experience genuine emotion when reading or watching fictional stories. Importantly, these emotional experiences are appropriate, typically mirroring our emotional responses to real life, highlighting the role of story in exercising and expanding our moral imagination.
Part 4, “Imagination in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science,” probes a cluster of phenomena that inform our understanding of human nature, the self, and action. For example, how is it that we can imaginatively resist certain (abhorrent) fictional scenarios (chapter 17) or understand or imagine being others by mentally simulating being them (chapters 19 & 20) or engage in make-believe (chapters 22 & 23)? Notably, Dustin Stokes’s chapter entitled “Imagination and Creativity” (chapter 18) insightfully delineates the role of imagination in the creative process, arguing that freedom and spontaneity of the productive imagination play a crucial role in art, scientific discovery, and in the stories with which we narrate our lives. Ruth Byrne’s essay “Imagination and Rationality” (chapter 25) is unique, highlighting empirical evidence from psychological studies on counterfactual reasoning that suggest the same sort of computational processes are involved in reasoning and imagining.
Part 5, “Imagination in Ethics, Moral Psychology, and Political Philosophy,” highlights the role of imagination in the moral and political life, including an important essay (chapter 28) on the ethics of imaginative experiences (in fantasizing, engaging with fictions, and in dreaming). In another illuminating essay (chapter 26) from this section, Mark Johnson argues that we ought to abandon the deeply rooted assumption that the right moral decision is given in advance via rationally derived principles. Rather, the imagination plays a key role, a constitutive role, in moral deliberation (e.g., in addressing clashes of values, conflicts of ends, and moral indeterminacy).
Part 6 addresses the role of imagination in the cognitive life including philosophy, mathematics, and science. Peter Kung’s essay (chapter 32) is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the state of the debate over Hume’s famous dictum that “imagination is a guide to possibility.” Also in this section, Roy Sorensen canvasses another key contribution the imagination plays in discovery via thought experiments (chapter 31). Thought experiments are like actual (scientific) experiments except that the knowledge gained is through the imagination instead of perception, all without hazard or expense!
Each of the 34 essays sets the stage for further exploration, providing the conceptual framework and bibliographical details from which the interested reader can forge ahead to new vistas of the imaginative landscape. For the theist, applications abound. In particular, the doctrines of creation, omnipotence, and omniscience could be further illuminated by considering the nature and role of the divine imagination in creating, grounding modal reality, and in knowing what it is like to be another via simulation. I highly recommend this handbook as a helpful guide in exploring the philosophy of the imagination.
