The dialectic between reason and imagination forms a key element in Romantic and post- Romantic philosophy, science, literature, and art. Inventions of the Imagination explores the diverse theories and assessments of this dialectic in essays by philosophers and literary and cultural critics. By the end of the eighteenth century, reason as the predominant human faculty had run its course, and imagination emerged as another force whose contributions to human intellectual existence and productivity had to be newly calculated and constantly recalibrated. The attempt to establish a universal form of reason alongside a plurality of imaginative capacities describes the ideological program of modernism from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. This collection chronicles some of the vicissitudes in the conceptualization and evaluation of the imagination across time and in various disciplines.

Introduction / Richard T. Gray

1. Imagination on the Move / Wolfgang Welsch

2. The Poetics of Nature: Literature and Constructive Imagination in the History of Geology / Georg Braungart

3. Between Imagination and Reason: Kant and Spinoza on Fictions / Beth Lord

4. Herder on Interpretation and Imagination / Michael N. Forster

5. William Blake: Imagination, Vision, Inspiration, Intellect / Hazard Adams

6. Imaginative Power as Prerequisite for an Aesthetics of Freedom in Friedrich Schiller’s Works / Wilhelm Voskamp

7. The Gentle Force over Pictures: Hegel’s Philosophical Conception of the Imagination / Klaus Vieweg

8. The Status of Literature in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: On the Lives of Concepts / Robert B. Pippin

9. Difficult Freedom: Hegel’s Symbolic Art and Schelling’s Historiography in The Ages of the World (1815) / Tilottama Rajan

10. From Art to History: Schelling’s Modern Mythology and the Coming Community / Richard Block

11. “To impose is not to discover”: A Romantic-Modernist Continuity in Contradiction / Christoph Bode

Biographies of Editors and Contributors

Index