A post by Stephen Asma

Imagination is finally getting some love from philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.

My own work has been a tiny contribution to the resurgence of imagination studies, especially in the interface between neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and evolution (Asma, 2017). This essay, however, is not about respectable imagination studies. No, this is about the weird stuff –the eccentric history and philosophy of imagination.

None of what follows will get you tenure, or an invitation to speak somewhere prestigious. It will not gain you influential friends, and it might even prevent you from getting a date. But it needs to be aired, contemplated, and even celebrated. As cognitively fluid systems (like imagination, or language) expand into ecological niches, they themselves “play” and “experiment” and sometimes become adaptations, or exaptations, or spandrels, or deleterious dead ends. Theories are like this too. To my mind, not all the weird theories of imagination presented below are dead ends, and some may yet prove valuable –even if we’re not sure how.