Abstract
What is imagination? Philosophy usually presents it as something foolish and childish. Actually, in Aristotle, we discover the opposite: imagination is cognitively needed by the mind: to deliberate, to act, to reason, to think. Whenever perception is not available, our minds draw on imaginations, on representations and mental images, to envisage, portray and rationally combine their contents. I am going to claim that, in this process, we end up enriching our thinking with characters, tendencies and personal references, that reflect and enhance our inner individual nature, rather than a supposedly atemporal and conceptual apodicticity. Discussing Aristotle outside any philosophical convention, I define phantasia as the triggering of our innerly retained affections and as the triggering of those individual organic patterns and traits settled in our innerness. If reasoning needs to rely on imaginations, rather than on aisthemata (simply because a current perception of a content is presently impossible), when composing and calculating scenarios, and figuring concepts and contents, our minds will cognitively subsume and rationally structure the alterations conveyed in imagining. Around this path, imagination’s phantasmata prove to be leads, the material reason pushing our human reflection to conceive circumstances and this world under a certain light instead of another. The basic imaginative shifts we cast on sensible perceivable data infect our knowledge and they even become the true lever of our intellectual curiosity and epistemological capacity. Hence, imagination might keep an arbitrary nature, but its same arbitrariness dwells and integrates our logical and exact reflection. We cannot minimize the role of imagining and we cannot underestimate the active role imagination has in the structuring of world-views and shared scientific paradigms. Imagination reveals to be a bridge between the perceivable and the conceptual, an interface; instead of considering imagination a marginal, non-paradigmatic experience, we should instead take it into consideration, and study it, as the central element determining the outcome of our presentations of the world.