In a new reading of Immanuel Kant’s work, this book interrogates his notions of the imagination and anthropology, identifying these – rather than the problem of reason – as the two central pivoting orientations of his work. Such an approach allows a more complex understanding of his critical-philosophical program to emerge, which includes his accounts of reason, politics and freedom as well as subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or sociabilities. Examining Kant’s theorisation of the complexity of our phenomenological existence, the author explores his transcendental move that includes reason and understanding whilst emphasising the importance of the faculty of the imagination to undergird both, before moving to consider Kant’s pluralised, transcendental notion of freedom. This outstanding book will appeal to scholars with interests in philosophy, politics, anthropology and sociology, working on questions of imagination, reason, subjectivities and human freedom.
Introduction: A Pragmatic Anthropology with Imaginative Intent
1. Freedom as Release from Self-Incurred Tutelage
2. Anthropological Investigations: Difficult Selves
3. The Critique of Impure Reason: The Schematic Imagination
4. The Harmony and Dissonance of the Beautiful and the Sublime
5. Kant’s Political-Cosmopolitan Notion of Freedom: Freedom, Society and Politics in the Context of Unsociable Sociability
6. Creating Sociable Sociability: Practical Imagining
7. Difficult Selves, Imagination and Blurred Sketches of Freedom
Biography
John Rundell is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at La Trobe University and Principal Honorary (Social Theory) in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research focusses on the problems of the imagination, creativity and modernity. He is the author of Imaginaries of Modernity: Politics, Cultures, Tensions and Origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx; the editor of Aesthetics and Modernity: Essays by Agnes Heller, and the co-editor of Critical Theories and the Budapest School; Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity; Classical Readings on Culture and Civilization; Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship; Critical Theory After Habermas: Encounters and Departures; Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Philosophy; Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory; and Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity.
