Imagination

In this paper, after a qvick reference to Coleridge's view on imagination, an attempt is made to have a new look at this concept. Three faculties were believed by philosophers and physicians to exist in mind: 1) fancy which is the store of perceived images 2) memory and 3) imagination which is on the one hand related to the memory and on the hand to the fancy.In th next part of the peper, different predicatcs are explained. Three stories -- "Elahi- (...) Nameh", "Mantegh al-Tayr", "Mosibat- Nameh" and some stories about some Sufi learned men narrated by Attar in "Tazkere-Al Oulia" are analysed and interpreted. (shrink)

In the Persian eloquence, the imagination forms mainly comprise simile and metaphor. However, metonymy and irony as well are discussed under the same title. Although in Persian eloquence, rhetoric discusses such four important subjects, it is somewhat different in the western eloquence. The present study deals in brief with these four subjects. Although the word metonymy can be considered as the approximate equivalent of the word 'majaz' and in both languages it is perceived as a kind of change, the general (...) perception of these two topics is different. As a case in point one could refer to differences between metonymy in Persian and English. Basically, there is no counterpart in English to what is called the interest and analogy in Persian eloquence. In simile and 'tashbih', more common points could be found. However, diverse categorizations of 'tashbih' cannot be found for simile. Although some categorizations could be considered similar (for example 'submerged simile' and 'tashbihe nahofte (hidden simile) is near to the “tashbih”, the metaphor and “esteaareh” compared with other imagination forms have more points in common. Amongst the four types of diction techniques, irony and “kenayeh” have more differences. Irony is mostly used with the intension of broadening, radicalization, satire and criticism and is often encountered in the structure of a play, story. However, “kenayeh” is not simply used with the above said intentions for irony but it has implications for more obvious expression of concepts. Also “kenayeh” is often limited to words and expressions while irony is mostly used in long stories and plays. (shrink)

This article reviews Stephen K. Levine’s 2019 book, Philosophy of Expressive Arts Therapy: Poiesis and the Therapeutic Imagination. The book, complete with poetry and anecdotes is connected to larger concepts in psychology, phenomenology and philosophy. The article summarizes the books contents and offers a review from the perspective of phenomenology and the expressive art practice.

Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, everything (...) is true, or nothing is true. I show that imagination-based worries about impossible, unlimited, and empty fictions can be shown to be about sensory imagination and that sensory imagination isn’t necessary for fictional truth. (shrink)

Several philosophers including Kripke have contended that fictional entities do exist as abstract objects, and fictional names refer to such abstract entities. Kripke and Thomasson compare fictional entities to existing social entities. Kripke also reflects on fictions inside fictions to support his view. Many philosophers appeal to the apparent fact that we quantify over fictional entities. Such arguments in favor of the existence of fictional entities are critically scrutinized. It is argued that they are much less compelling than their proponents (...) suggest and involve various obscurities. (shrink)

The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of (...) which is imagined or remembered rather than occurrent. Surveying all eighteen forms of implementing the method, I argue that in all of the proposed pairings, the substitution of imagination or recollection for perceptual experience in the method, is either inconceivable or impermissible. I identify four reasons why I think imagination cannot be substituted for real experience, and three reasons why recollection cannot be substituted for real experience. If my argument works, there is no form of implementing the method that is useful for discovering the contents of experience, and thus the method is not a well‐functioning tool to study the contents of perception. (shrink)

This essay deals with the relation between imagination and experience in contemporary poetological discussions. It outlines the much debated question which author subjects are eligible to generate which facets of literary representation. The essay tries to locate these current positions in the history of literary hermeneutics since Dilthey.

In this paper I describe a novel application of contemplative techniques to software engineering with the goal of augmenting the intellectual capabilities of knowledge workers within the field in four areas: flexibility, attention, creativity, and trust. The augmentation of software engineers’ intellectual capabilities is proposed as a third complement to the traditional focus of methodologies on the process and environmental factors of the software development endeavor. I argue that these capabilities have been shown to be open to improvement through the (...) practices traditionally used in spiritual traditions, but now used increasingly in other fields of knowledge work, such as in the medical profession and the education field. Historically, the intellectual capabilities of software engineers have been treated as a given within any particular software development effort. This is argued to be an aspect ripe for inclusion within software development methodologies. (shrink)

A sentential operator is extensional if and only if we can replace any of its arguments by a sentence with the same truth-value, salva veritate. For instance, b.

This paper explores the core characteristics of Vratislav Effenberger’s theoretical system, highlighting his perspective on the significance of imagination in ideological thinking. It provides background and an overview of Effenberger’s concept of ideology, outlines the Surrealist notion of imagination, and presents the author’s methodological connection of Surrealism, psychoanalysis, and Prague Structuralism. Effenberger emerges as a thinker dedicated to bridging the gap between the modernist (primarily avant-garde) interpretation of the world and the postmodern tendencies evident from the mid-20th century onwards. In (...) Effenberger’s terms, ideology is an approach to reality that aims to grasp it as at least a potentially meaningful totality and engages in the actualization of this meaning or totality in social and psychological practice. He argues that such an approach is closely linked with avant-garde thought, which, for various reasons, has diminished in significance since the Second World War. In place of prior unifying perspectives, relativism and skepticism have become more dominant. However, Effenberger contends that integrative inclinations remain alive in human thought in the form of “idea models” found in the field of “psychoideology”—the realm of preconscious thought formation. These idea models play a pivotal role in psychoideology, nurturing the dialectics of imaginative and conceptual reasoning, which are vital for fostering innovation and creative endeavors. (shrink)

Sensory-perceptive activity expresses the attributes of real objects and provides information connected to both external and internal reality. Perception helps us embed the information taken from sensations, helping us form the perceptive image that must be completed by each individual in their existence. Practically, perception facilitates the adaptation to reality depending on the experiences of each individual. A method that patients may learn to control their various perceptions is self-regulation by mental images, and here we can consider various approaches to (...) the mental image. Mental imagery is important for the perception of pain, being an easy method to manage pain. Here we can also describe the pain of the ‘phantom member,’ whom certain people that have amputated members still perceive, and which consists of cortical processing of pain, without being triggered by pain receptors, because they lack it. The data described herein confirms and helps us contour the fact that the image of a sensory circumstance may influence neuronal processes which create real sensory experiences. (shrink)

This article considers the role played by communications infrastructure within the international legal imagination. It engages with contemporary debates regarding the power of corporate digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. An international legal historical perspective is adopted in order to contextualise international law’s present infrastructural turn and connect current debates over big tech with their precursors. The history of international legal engagement with the development of communications infrastructure reveals a recurring pattern of looking to technological infrastructure for solutions (...) to global problems. This can act to empower private actors and contribute to an ongoing absence of meaningful international legal regulation of communications. The contemporary interest in infrastructure, and its implications in terms of fostering the private power of big tech over global communications, is in many ways a return. But it could also take account of alternative visions for international law which were present at key moments during the League of Nations era and the Cold War. Connecting current debates with those earlier moments in international legal history can help to highlight and counter continuing patterns of technological solutionism within the international legal imagination. (shrink)

Este trabajo abordará cuestiones esenciales sobre el imaginario colectivo y sus relaciones con la realidad y la verdad. Primero, debemos abordar este tema dentro de un marco conceptual, seguido del correspondiente análisis fáctico de realidades conductuales demostrables. Adoptaremos no solo la metodología, sino sobre todo los principios y proposiciones de la filosofía analítica, que seguramente quedarán patentes a lo largo del estudio y podrán identificarse por las características descritas por Pérez. : Rabossi (1975) sostiene que la filosofía analítica puede identificarse (...) considerando ciertos parecidos familiares. Sugiere los siguientes rasgos familiares: una actitud positiva hacia el conocimiento científico; un enfoque cauteloso de la metafísica; una concepción de la filosofía como tarea conceptual, que toma como método el análisis conceptual; una estrecha relación entre lengua y Filosofía; una preocupación por buscar respuestas argumentativas a problemas filosóficos; la búsqueda de claridad conceptual. -/- Estos conceptos originales implican contenidos culturales, sociales, religiosos, científicos, filosóficos, morales y políticos propios de cada existencia colectiva. En este estudio no debatiremos ni demostraremos. Nuestro objetivo no es establecer sistemáticamente un método, criticar o aportar pruebas. Este trabajo se basa en la reflexión analítica. Especularemos lo más completa y profundamente posible y expresaremos los resultados de nuestros pensamientos. Sin perjuicio del carácter multidisciplinar del tema y de la apertura metodológica para aceptar aportaciones de cualquier campo científico, este trabajo pertenece a la psicología y la ontología o, en otras palabras, a la psicología social y ontológica. La metodología libre que orienta estas reflexiones abarca y considera todo lo que se acerca a la coherencia con la epistemología filosófica y psicológica. Esta metodología no busca evidencia, sino que busca la interrelación entre evidencia existente de cualquier naturaleza y magnitud, infiriendo significado consistente a partir de cosas reales. Muchos grandes pensadores en ningún momento han buscado demostraciones, teorizaciones o sistematizaciones. Estos pensadores pensaron, meditaron y pudieron acercarse a la verdad con la iluminación de su humildad. Ellos serán nuestra referencia y el ejemplo a seguir. De hecho, no encontraremos la verdad. Sin embargo, de una cosa podemos estar seguros: muchas veces nos acercaremos a la verdad y en todo momento nos alejaremos de la mentira. El objetivo principal de este estudio es observar cómo funcionan algunos de los atributos evolutivos esenciales de la humanidad. Al igual que la creatividad, la imaginación y la asociación pueden convertirse en una enfermedad peligrosa, al abrigo de las brumosas sombras de la inteligencia. -/- . (shrink)

In 1817, the German botanist Ludolph Christian Treviranus (1779–1864), while working on cytoplasmic streaming, exclaimed “What a matter for new observations and what an expectation for a more profo...

Untersuchungen zur Poetologie des Ungeheuers oder zur Ästhetik des Monströsen im 18. Jahrhundert haben sich bisher fast ausschließlich mit dem Paradigma der ›weiblichen Einbildungskraft‹ beschäftigt. Im Mittelpunkt dieses Aufsatzes stehen dagegen Holbachs und Diderots Theorien der Monstrogenese, die einen radikalen Bruch mit dem Modell der Imagination, der Ähnlichkeit und der Autorschaft verfügen. Deren interessanteste ästhetische Konsequenz bildet das neue Denken des Ungeheuren, wie es gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts u. a. in der Malerei Goyas hervortritt.

Modern empirical psychology, as a reductionist, materialist, and positivist science, has to a great extent replaced philosophical psychology – or more precisely philosophical anthropology– in our contemporary world, and this has caused modern psychology to lose sight of what was most interesting in pre-modern psychology, namely the attempt to situate the human person in his experience of reality in the lifeworld (lebenswelt). This has resulted in the practice of psychology becoming detached from the realities of lived experience as its view (...) of human nature becomes increasingly narrow, rigid and scientistic. This is evidenced by the current “replication crisis” in modern psychology, which has severely impacted the credibility of modern psychology as a field of enquiry. This crisis arose with an increasing methodological standardisation that is being pursued at the expense of interrogating the scientistic presuppositions that ground the study of modern psychology. (shrink)

This article examines the role of the imagination in Fanon's and Husserl's work in order to rethink Fanon's relationship with Husserlian phenomenology. I begin with an investigation of the oft-overlooked ways in which the imagination appears in Wretched of the Earth. Here, I argue that Fanon puts a great deal of stock in the imagination, ultimately calling upon this faculty in order to presage the novel ways of being, thinking, and acting, which are a recurrent signature of his vision of (...) decolonization. In the latter half of the article, I then offer an account of the decisive methodological significance of the imagination within Husserl's work. Revisiting the methodological infrastructure of phenomenology with Fanonian concerns in mind casts Husserl's project in a surprising new light, bringing to the fore the revolutionary potential of both the epoché and the method of eidetic variation. For at the core of Husserlian methodology lies a resolve to exceed the limits of our present empirical reality—a leitmotiv of Fanon's own thinking. I ultimately show that Fanon's work can thus be imagined as a reactivation, indeed a revolution, inaugurated at the heart of phenomenology and its most basic methodological commitments. (shrink)

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the (...) ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before! (shrink)

1. Firmly grounded in Political Discourse Theory (PDT), this article is a study of how the spatial–political imaginary of conservative Protestants in nineteenth-century Derry city, a contested spac...

Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flipped the switch to illuminate the room). Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain group affiliation or identity (e.g., in order to belong to the Christian Reformed Church Neil must believe that God is triune). If we set aside the commonality of the word "belief," we can pose a crucial question: Is the cognitive attitude typically involved in the first "light (...) switch" sort of case the same as the cognitive attitude typically involved in the second "Trinity" sort of case? Or: Is mundanely believing the same cognitive relation as groupishly believing? In this essay, I argue that the answer is no. Mundane Beliefs play their instrumental roles well if they are true, and their manner of processing is accordingly sensitive to evidence. Groupish Beliefs play their identity-constituting roles well if they are distinctive, and their manners of processing accordingly allow for and often support distortions of evidence and truth. The manners of processing are thus so different that--despite the common word "belief"--philosophy of mind and epistemology would do well to recognize distinct cognitive attitudes. (shrink)

Humanitarian maps assembled using digital technology are indicative of transformations underway in how the world is made knowable, sensible, and actionable, including for international legal purposes. These transformations are exemplified by the Missing Maps Project (MMP), an initiative of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a U.S.-registered non-profit, and three other non-governmental organisations operating internationally: American Red Cross; British Red Cross; and Médecins Sans Frontières. Projects such as the MMP make it harder for international lawyers to lay claim to, and seek to (...) imaginatively reorient, shared repositories of common sense. Meanwhile, international legal scholars continue to propagate ideas that the world may be reimagined with their help, largely without regard to such transformations. In lieu of imagination’s standard evocation to the end of enhancing critical agency in international legal writing, this article contends that the idiosyncratic notion of imagination advanced in the writings of Walter Benjamin may be better attuned to ongoing shifts in sense-making apparent in international humanitarian mapping. Walter Benjamin’s atypical rendering of imagination as a ‘purely receptive, uncreative’ force in a field of technological reproduction offers international legal scholars another way of thinking about agency and prospects for re-forming their field in the face of its burgeoning digitalisation. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:The lullaby “The Meadow Song” in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy provides a narrative fulcrum and plays a vital role in reinforcing these novels’ thematic concern. However, extant criticism has not given due attention to its utopian function. Drawing upon Ernest Bloch’s philosophy of music and other critics’ theories on green utopia, this article intends to argue that the lullaby fulfills the utopian function of fueling Katniss’s and other rebels’ utopian imagination to fight for a better world of justice, (...) equality, and freedom. It also posits that the green utopian community inspired by the lullaby in the last book of the trilogy functions not as an escapist pursuit, but as a micropolitical alternative in an era of global capitalism. (shrink)

Abstract:Critics often misinterpret Beckett’s Worstward Ho as being about the phenomenology of presence. The narrator, however, engages not with things that exist but, instead, the process of imaginative conjuring. The procedure resembles Sartre’s phenomenological method in The Imaginary and Beckett’s fictional depiction of the imagination serves as a corrective to Sartre’s “essential poverty” of the image—its lack of context. Worstward Ho demonstrates instead the image’s polyvalent contextual compatibility, which explains not only the referential ambivalence of Beckett’s work, but also the (...) truth function of fiction itself, wherein the imaginary particular is amenable to general insights into the real. (shrink)

Abstract:Frantz Fanon is best known as the author of two monographs: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a literary and psychological account of Black experience and anti-Black racism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a political manifesto arguing for the need to respond to colonial oppression with revolutionary violence. His critics contend that the disciplinary division evinces a failure to successfully integrate the psychological with the political, which detracts from his intellectual legacy. In this article, I employ criminologist Jon Frauley’s (...) theory of the analytic value of fictional film to demonstrate that Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) not only provides an empirical referent for Fanon’s psychological and political theories but also reveals an underlying coherence that is not always obvious. I begin with a summary of Frauley’s theory and then alternate between Fanon’s theories and the way in which the film provides those theories with empirical referents. My conclusion, which highlights an essential continuity between individual transcendence and collective action in Fanon, draws on both Blade Runner 2049 and the military tactic of pseudo operations, which was employed to devastating effect against anti-colonial struggles in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The study of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, known as taṣawwuf to those closer to the sources and practices, has come a long way since Richard Eaton compl.

The author critically reviews the content and specific chapters of the Handbook of Embodied Cognition and Sport Psychology, focusing on the importance of imagination and creativity within the cognitive science of sport. Emphasis is placed on the concept of motor imagery, which plays a central role in enhancing athlete performance. In addition, the following section explores the topic of measuring creativity in a way that is appropriate to the specific discipline, while also taking into account its enactive and embodied nature. (...) This understanding allows for a more comprehensive exploration and cultivation of creativity. (shrink)

Phenomenology is one of the main currents of modern philosophy. Philosophers most often understand it from the perspective of Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) phenomenology as a concept of cognition and a method of viewing and describing what is directly given, i.e. a phenomenon. In addition, phenomenology is the fundamental science – prima philosophia that determines what and how is directly given. Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), a student of E. Husserl, was the first thinker in Poland who practiced philosophy in a phenomenological way. (...) R. Ingarden contributed to the dissemination of Husserl’s phenomenology in Poland and became an outstanding phenomenologist who developed an original phenomenological path proposing a creative reception of his teacher’s thoughts between World Wars II and I. Inagrden’s phenomenological path was different from Husserl’s. While Husserl developed a transcendental-idealistic form of phenomenology, Ingarden did not wholly abandon the transcendental path but went toward realism. The Polish phenomenologist did not want to question his master’s concept of the transcendental Self but only wanted to find a place for this Self in the real world. Polish thinkers who further deepened the creative reception of Husserl’s phenomenology have always gathered around Ingarden. One such person was Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (1923–2014). Their professor-student meeting occurred at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow just after the end of World War II. Husserl’s phenomenology inspired A.-T. Tymieniecka, but this was phenomenology understood by Ingarden, taking into account the realism of the world and the entire sphere of empiricism. We can assume that the scholar’s meeting with Ingarden allowed Tymieniecka to develop her phenomenological concept, which she called the concept of the phenomenology of life and the human creative condition. It is a phenomenology that rejects idealism and chooses the realism of the world and life in the cosmic dimension. The human being here is a living entity whose life is anchored in nature but ultimately evolves and develops in culture through scientific and technological activities. In this cosmological and dynamically changing perspective, the source experience of the subject – a living being – becomes the experience of being alive and living in the unity-of-erything-there-is-alive. Therefore, Tymieniecka rejected the primordial nature of the cognitive-constitutive act of the pure consciousness, which we deal with in classical phenomenology, favouring a creative act founded in man’s creative imagination and only secondarily reflected in the cognitive act. The Polish philosopher believed that only in such a case is there a possibility of freedom in the human world of life and, thus – authentic self-realisation and self-interpretation of man in existence. (shrink)

This article offers a reply to commentaries from Amy Kind, Casey O’Callaghan, and Wayne Wu. It features a defense and further analysis of perceptual malleability, as defended in _Thinking and Perceiving_. In turn, it considers the consequences of malleability for attention and the cognitive penetrability of perception, imagination and perceptual skills, and perceptual content and objectivity.

I argue that when it comes to understanding other people, humans have a problem that involves a combination of poor imagination and excessive trust in this imagination. Often, the problem has to do with what I call "runaway simulation" - clinging to the assumption that another person resembles you despite glaring counter-evidence. I then argue that the same type of problem appears intra-personally, as we fail miserably to imagine potential and future selves. Finally, I argue that this fact goes a (...) long way to explain the phenomenology of many transformative experiences, an explanation that does not require a special kind of knowledge to exist along the lines of "knowing what it's like". (shrink)

The post-Darwinian double-aspect theory that Professor Robert Kunzendorf's introduces in On the Evolution of Conscious Sensation, Conscious Imagination, and Consciousness of Self points to evolutionary functions of certain sensations, youngling vivid images, and self-consciousness.

This paper attempts to examine imagination with respect to its two poles and argues that in the phenomenological framework the locus of imagination is one between perception and ideation. Where imagination approaches perception we encounter the terminus a quo of imagination and therefore its lower limit and where it approximates ideation we encounter its terminus ad quem and therefore its upper limit. In the former case we find the first form of imagination, which is the least articulated sense of imagination: (...) image-consciousness. In the latter case we find the last form of imagination, which is the most articulated sense of imagination: free phantasy. On the one hand, then, image-consciousness is delineated from perception, and accordingly it is delineated from something that is determined. On the other hand, free phantasy is delineated from ideation, and as such it is delineated from something that is determining it. Situated between something that is determined and something that is determining it, the different forms of imagination can be said to have acquired different levels of freedom; imagination becomes freer the more it departs from perception and the more it approximates ideation. (shrink)

This work tells the story of the rise of the modern German environmental imagination, with particular emphasis on its narrative and visual components.

Francesco Berto proposed a logic for imaginative episodes. The logic establishes certain (in)validities concerning episodic imagination. They are not all equally plausible as principles of episodic imagination. The logic also does not model that the initial input of an imaginative episode is deliberately chosen.Stit-imagination logic models the imagining agent’s deliberate choice of the content of their imagining. However, the logic does not model the episodic nature of imagination. The present paper combines the two logics, thereby modelling imaginative episodes with deliberately (...) chosen initial input. We use a combination ofstit-imagination logic and a content-sensitive variably strict conditional à la Berto, for which we give a Chellas–Segerberg semantics. The proposed semantics has the following advantages over Berto’s: (i) we model thedeliberate choiceof initial input of imaginative episodes (in a multi-agent setting), (ii) we showframe correspondencesfor axiomatic analogues of Berto’s validities, which (iii) allows thepossibility to disregard axiomsthat might be considered not plausible as principles concerning imaginative episodes. We do not take a definite stance on whether theseshouldbe disregarded but give reasons for why one might want to disregard them. Finally, we compare our semantics briefly with recent work, which aims to model voluntary imagination, and argue that our semantics models different aspects. (shrink)

The man and his times -- Early epistemology -- The new scientific mind -- Fragmentation and the temptation of ontology -- Fire, water, and the material imagination -- Air, earth, and the dynamic imagination -- A phenomenology of the creative imagination.

In the context of the Anthropocene the imagination has three main tasks. Firstly, it is the task of imagination to help to recall historical and cultural facts from history and other cultures. The imagination helps to transcend distance and to make things that are far away from us in time or space part of our personal experience that influence the way we act. To understand the situation of the Anthropocene we need to make things come alive through our imagination. Without (...) the imagination it is not possible for us to understand historical developments, for our emotions to be stirred by them and for us to be challenged to act in new ways. Secondly, the imagination can qualify historical and cultural developments by making us aware that all developments could also have evolved differently. The imagination can combine diverse facts in a variety of ways; it makes new connections between individual factors and produces new ways of looking at things. As a result, we become aware of alternatives. Thirdly, the imagination helps to develop new scenarios which provide a framework for the destructive effects of the Anthropocene to be corrected. For this to happen new ways of living and acting are imagined that contain utopian elements geared towards sustainability. These serve as examples of good scenarios and practices. (shrink)

Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the (...) global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination. (shrink)