Miscellaneous Imagination Links.

(In no particular order. A listing here does not necessarily imply any endorsement of the views expressed at the destination sites. - N.J.T.T.)

Once upon a time this page provided a fairly comprehensive listing of web sites with something to say about the nature or mechanism of imagination. However, with the speed at which the web now grows and changes, it is not really possible to keep up any more. Some of the sites listed here are listed because they were around when this page was first made, some because I think they are particularly interesting, and some by sheer chance. They vary very widely in quality, and very likely there are many better sites that I either do not know about or have not found the time to include.

• Encyclopedia/Dictionary Entries.
  Varying definitions and discussions from various sources:
  • Imagination - from the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind. My own view.
  • Imagination - definitions from several dictionaries (at dictionary.com).
  • Imagination - from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
  • Imagination - from A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names by Garth Kemerling M.A.
  • Imagination - from the glossary to Art and Experience, by Rob van Gerwen (Dutch philosopher/aesthetician). Useful internal hyperlinking.
  • Imagination - The Catholic Encyclopedia (print edition of 1913). God's eye view.
    • [Review of God's view, by Marc Fonda.]
  • Imagination - Definitions found by Google™ (however, most of them are references to songs, bands, etc.).
  • Imagination and Fancy - from the "great" 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
    The contemporary version of Encyclopedia Britannica now requires a subscription to access articles, but the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, acknowledged by the cognoscenti as the best ever Britannica (even, perhaps, the best ever encyclopedia!) is now available free online. Beware, however, of scanning errors.
  
  

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• Image Schemata. Extract from Mark Johnson's book The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Click here for a note on the various senses of the term schema (plural: schemata).

• Aristotle's Psychology: Imagination. Section from entry (by Christopher Shields) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

• A Cognitive Theory of Pretense. By Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich. A boxological theory of pretense, that doubles as a theory of imagination. Apparently, to imagine that X is to place a mental representation of X in your "Possible Worlds Box".

• Imagination. Notes by Cosma Rohilla Shalizi.

• Quotations about Imagination. From Greater Horizons Inc.

• The Center for the Imagination in Language Learning. Educationally oriented site, for language teachers. Publishes The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning.

• Home Page of Jerome L. Singer, distinguished developmental psychologist and researcher on imagination and fantasy, especially in children.

• The Human Imagination: Our Seventh Sense! An essay by Donald L. Hamilton.

• Introduction to the book Imagination in Teaching and Learning, by educationalist Kieran Egan. You can also buy or comment on the book, and read and participate in an online discussion of the issues it raises.

• Brief digests, by Carl Stahmer, of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), that discuss the important accounts of imagination found in these works.

• "The Role of the Imagination in Kant's Theory of Experience," by Wilfrid Sellars.

• "The Imagination in Wundt's Treatment of Myth and Religion", by George Herbert Mead.
  The great social scientist on the "father of scientific psychology" (first published 1906).

• Imagination in the eighteenth century literature of sensibility (with excerpts from original texts). From: The Dictionary of Sensibility, English Department, University of Virginia.

• Marc Fonda's Imagination Pages. From a Jungian perspective.

• Aesthetics On-Line. The official web site of the American Society for Aesthetics.

• Coleridge's Imagination. From Everything2.com.

• Imagination in Coleridge, by John Spencer Hill. Author's site, giving the complete text of his 1978 book, recovered from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

• Symposium on Imaginative Minds held by The British Academy in 2004.

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