A post by Luca Tateo

The multiplication of “imaginations” in current social and human sciences does only lead to a logic conclusion: imagining is a ubiquitous human act. Sociological imagination; ecological imagination; philosophical imagination; scientific imagination; musical imagination, etc.: the infinite list of new imaginations pairs along with the infinite multiplication of “intelligences” in psychology – emotional; spatial; mathematical; logical; visual; musical; you name it (Gardner, 2003). The result is to have a concept, prefixed by an adjective, which creates nothing but an umpteenth disciplinary boundary so that one can say, “I work in ecological imagination” and probably have a new journal with the same name. This will lead nowhere in advancing our understanding of imagination.

It may be time to rethink imagination as a higher mental function that is implied in all human activities. My long-term research project, culminated in the volume “A Theory of Imagining, Knowing and Understanding” (Tateo, 2020), aimed exactly at rethinking the way we consider imagination and at developing a theory of imaginative work as a higher mental function. In other words, I am proposing to develop a unified theory of imagining.