私たちを目の前の現実から解放し、感覚を豊かなものに、経験を意味あるものにして、人間性を形づくる想像力を取り上げ、概説します。哲学、美学、文学、認知理論、人間科学を駆使して、想像力という概念の変遷と、認知における想像力の役割について説明し、日常における想像力の重要性から、芸術的創作や科学的発見、発明などに発揮される創造性までを検討します。洞窟画から現代絵画、パフォーマンス・アートからポップ・アート、物理学から現象学、技術的発明から文学、ナスカの地上絵から演劇、詩、ジャズの即興演奏まで幅広い事例を挙げ、想像力の哲学と、人間の思考における想像力の関わりに光を当てます。
  

• Identifies multiple modes of imagination and explores creativity as their material or communicative manifestation
• Explains the philosophy of imagination from ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary cognitive theory
• Includes methodological perspectives from across disciplines, including phenomenology and cognitive theory, evolutionary theory, philosophy of mind, aesthetics and literary theory, as well as the human sciences
• Illuminates imagination from prehistoric creativity to modern technological and artistic innovation
• Engages a broad range of examples from across the arts and sciences, technological invention, and everyday life

   
Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world.
  
Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together with contemporary explanations of its role in cognition to explain its importance in everyday life as well as the exquisite creativity of the arts, scientific discovery, and invention.
   
Engaging examples from cave paintings to modern painting, performance art to pop art, physics to phenomenology, technological inventions to literary worlds, the Nazca geoglyphs to dramatic theatre, poetry, and jazz improvisation, the author illuminates with clarity and vision the philosophy of imagination and the stakes of its involvement in human thinking.