Lectures on Imagination

Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures.

The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world.

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was the John Nuveen Professor in the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was the author of many books, including Memory, History, Forgetting, Oneself as Another, and the three-volume Time and Narrative, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

George Taylor (JD, Harvard University) is Professor Emeritus of Law at University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on evaluating the methods by which judges and lawyers interpret statutory and constitutional law. His publications include Ricoeur and Law: The Distinctiveness of Legal Hermeneutics, in Ricoeur Across the Disciplines 84-101 (Scott Davidson ed., Continuum, 2010) and Law and Creativity, in Philosophy and American Law (Francis J. Mootz, III ed. March 2009).

Robert W. Sweeny was the Don Shula Chair in Philosophy at John Carroll University.

Jean-Luc Amalric teaches at the CPGE Arts and Design in Nîmes and The Research Center for Arts and Language (CRAL), EHESS, Paris.

Patrick F. Crosby was an independent Ricoeur scholar.