Order Of Imagination

Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted. Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the “civil” must be distinguished from the “political” as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay’s book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship—inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct. Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.

The human imagination manifests in countless different forms. We imagine the possible and the impossible. How do we do this so effortlessly? Why did the capacity for imagination evolve and manifest with undeniably manifold complexity uniquely in human beings? This handbook reflects on such questions by collecting perspectives on imagination from leading experts. It showcases a rich and detailed analysis on how the imagination is understood across several disciplines of study, including anthropology, archaeology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the arts. An integrated theoretical-empirical-applied picture of the field is presented, which stands to inform researchers, students, and practitioners about the issues of relevance across the board when considering the imagination. With each chapter, the nature of human imagination is examined - what it entails, how it evolved, and why it singularly defines us as a species.

"For more than forty years, Olivia Parker's poetic and alluring photographs have transformed the everyday and made the familiar strange. In deceptively simple still lives and complex, dreamlike constructions that incorporate a rich variety of found objects, her photographs create unexpected juxtapositions that provoke uncertainty and delight. Parker's longstanding fascination with flux and change extends to her most recent series, a powerful meditation on the devastating loss of her husband to Alzheimer's disease. This volume, the definitive study of Parker's career, includes curator Sarah Kennel's detailed artistic biography and poet and essayist Rachel Hadas's reflections on art's ability to offer solace amidst grief. More than one hundred beautifully illustrated works, many of which are published here for the first time, are accompanied by Parker's lyrical reflections on her art and process. This publication accompanies the exhibition Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, from July 13 to November 11, 2019. Formerly The Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum, Sarah Kennel is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta"--

Working from a cultural studies perspective, author D. K. Smith here examines a broad range of medieval and Renaissance maps and literary texts to explore the effects of geography on Tudor-Stuart cultural perceptions. He argues that the literary representation of cartographically-related material from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century demonstrates a new strain, not just of geographical understanding, but of cartographic manipulation, which he terms, "the cartographic imagination." Rather than considering the effects of maps themselves on early modern epistemologies, Smith considers the effects of the activity of mapping-the new techniques, the new expectations of accuracy and precision which developed in the sixteenth century-on the ways people thought and wrote. Looking at works by Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Marvell among other authors, he analyzes how the growing ability to represent physical space accurately brought with it not just a wealth of new maps, but a new array of rhetorical techniques, metaphors, and associations which allowed the manipulation of texts and ideas in ways never before possible.

Imagination allows individuals and groups to think beyond the here-and-now, to envisage alternatives, to create parallel worlds, and to mentally travel through time. Imagination is both extremely personal (for example, people imagine unique futures for themselves) and deeply social, as our imagination is fed with media and other shared representations. As a result, imagination occupies a central position within the life of mind and society. Expanding the boundaries of disciplinary approaches, the Handbook of Imagination and Culture expertly illustrates this core role of imagination in the development of children, adolescents, adults, and older persons today. Bringing together leading scholars in sociocultural psychology and neighboring disciplines from around the world, this edited volume guides readers towards a much deeper understanding of the conditions of imagining, its resources, its constraints, and the consequences it has on different groups of people in different domains of society. Summarily, this Handbook places imagination at the center, and offers readers new ways to examine old questions regarding the possibility of change, development, and innovation in modern society.

Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it.

Tying on case studies from late antiquity to the 21st century, this is the first volume that systematically explores the inter-relationship between fictional narratives about magic and the real-world ritual art of practicing magicians.

This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. Chapters 6 and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Omar Khayyam's Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination, by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, is a twelve-book series of which this book is the fifth volume, subtitled Khayyami Theology: The Epistemological Structures of the Robaiyat in All the Philosophical Writings of Omar Khayyam Leading to His Last Keepsake Treatise. Each book, independently readable, can be best understood as a part of the whole series. In Book 5, to understand the theological epistemology (or, way of knowing God) framing Khayyam's Robaiyat as spread out in all his philosophical works, Tamdgidi further offers the texts and his updated Persian and new English translations and analyses of six primary writings that preceded Khayyam's last keepsake treatise on the universals of existence: 1: Khayyam's annotated Persian translation of Avicenna's sermon in Arabic on God and creation; 2: Khayyam's treatise in Arabic addressed to Nasawi (wrongly regarded as an Avicenna pupil) on the created world and worship duty; 3-5: Khayyam's three treatises in Arabic (all addressed to Abu Taher, to whom Khayyam also dedicated his treatise on algebra) that are separate chapters of a three-part treatise on existence on topics ranging from the necessity of contradiction, determinism, survival, attributes of existents, and the light of intellect on 'existent' as the subject matter of universal science; and 6: Khayyam's treatise in Arabic addressed to Moshkavi (a supportive Shia intellectual) in response to three questions on soul's survival, on the necessity of accidents, and on the nature of time. The most fruitful way of understanding Khayyam's six texts is by regarding them as efforts made at defending his "succession order" thesis implicitly revealed when commenting on Avicenna's sermon and finalized in his last keepsake treatise. The texts served to offer the theological epistemology behind Khayyam's thesis, revealing his creative conceptualist view of existence that informed his poetic way of going about knowing God, creation, and himself within a unitary Islamic creationist-evolutionary worldview. Khayyam's way of knowing God and existence is non-dualistic, non-atomistic, and unitary in worldview, allowing for subject-included objectivity, probabilistic determinism, transcontinuous (or 'discontinuous') creative causality, transdisciplinarity, and transculturalism; it thus fulfils in a prescient way all the eight attributes of the quantum vision. Poetry is most conducive to unitary knowing, and subject-included objectivity must necessarily be self-reflective and thus engage intellective, emotional, and sensible modes of knowing. This explains why Khayyam transcended scholastic learning in favor of a poetic encounter with reality. What he meant by 'Drunkenness,' calling it the highest state of mind known to him, can thus be best understood as a unitary, quantum state of mind achieved by way of his poetry as a meditative art of self-purification. The goal, metaphorically, is to move from a way of knowing things as divisible grapes to a pure and unitary way of knowing them as indivisible Wine-paralleling what we call today moving from chunky Newtonian toward unitary quantum visions of reality. The key for entering Khayyam's secret tent is realizing that what he primarily meant by 'Wine' in his Robaiyat was self-referentially his Robaiyat itself, a key openly hidden therein thanks to his theological epistemology. For him, the Robaiyat was a lifelong work on himself, serving also human spiritual awakening to its place and duty in the succession order of God's creation. It also served his aspiration for a lasting soul. He knew the now-proven worth of his secret magnum opus, and that is why he so much praised his 'Wine.' About OKCIR—i Published to Date in the Series—ii About this Book—iv About the Author—viii Notes on Transliteration—xvii Acknowledgments—xix Preface to Book 5: Recap from Prior Books of the Series—1 Introduction to Book 5: Exploring the Theological Epistemology of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Philosophical Treatises—7 CHAPTER I—Omar Khayyam’s Annotated Persian Translation of Avicenna’s “Splendid Sermon” in Arabic on God’s Unity and Creation: The Manuscript with a New English Translation, Followed by Comparative Textual Analysis—17 CHAPTER II—Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Created World and Worship Duty: The Arabic Manuscript with Updated Persian and New English Translations, Followed by Textual Analysis—85 CHAPTER III—Part 1 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on Existence Addressed to Abu Taher Regarding the Necessity of Contradiction, Determinism, and Survival: The Arabic Manuscript and Updated Persian and New English Translations, Followed by Textual Analysis—175 CHAPTER IV—Part 2 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on Existence Addressed to Abu Taher Regarding Attributes: The Arabic Manuscript and Updated Persian and New English Translations, Followed by Textual Analysis—237 CHAPTER V—Part 3 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on Existence Addressed to Abu Taher Regarding the Light of Intellect on ‘Existent’ as the Subject Matter of Universal Science: The Arabic Manuscript and Updated Persian and New English Translations, Followed by Textual Analysis—305 CHAPTER VI—Omar Khayyam’s Treatise Addressed to Moshkavi in Response to Three Questions on Soul’s Survival, the Necessity of Accidents, and the Nature of Time: The Arabic Manuscript and Updated Persian and New English Translations, Followed by Textual Analysis—347 CHAPTER VII—From Grapes to Wine, Khayyam’s Unitary Way of Knowing: Integratively Understanding the Structures of Omar Khayyam’s Theological Epistemology in the Robaiyat as Spread Out in All His Philosophical Writings—409 Conclusion to Book 5: Summary of Findings—483 Appendix: Transliteration System and Book 5 Glossary—513 Book 5 Cumulative Glossary of Transliterations—526 Book 5 References—535 Book 5 Index—541