This chapter demonstrates that fundamental to the free harmony of the faculties is reflection understood as “an action of the power of imagination” and not as “the logical actus of the understanding.” The imagination, following its own law, provides, as it were, a schema of a universal that goes over and above the formal conditions of the possibility of empirical cognition while still being consistent with the latter. The free harmony of the faculties in which neither faculty is determining nor determined by the other gives us license for an indirect or analogical exhibition of the “supersensible substrate” of freedom, or what I call is the supersensible “within,” that is, the soul. Pure aesthetic pleasure, therefore, helps us close the gap between our phenomenal and our supersensible nature insofar as it intimates a unifying supersensible ground of our phenomenal nature, of our different inclinations and their anticipated satisfactions.

Beginning with an account of a late Victorian collection of Wordsworth’s poems, and the paper and botanical ephemera that were included in a copy of this edition, the introduction assesses Wordsworth’s daisy poems to pave the way for a broader discussion of the poet’s early interest in the poetics and politics of peace and how this interest was modified over the course of his career. Works examined in the Introduction include sonnets composed during the Peace of Amiens (1802–1803) and the ‘Immortality Ode’ from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The Introduction locates Wordsworth’s poetry on peace and war within the broader social, cultural, and political contexts of the period and also outlines the book’s conceptual framework.

This chapter surveys literary criticism during the high phase of modernism with special focus on major critics’ conflicting attitudes toward reality. I show that the word reality is of central importance in our understanding of the era’s literary culture. Critics largely agreed that reality is the best touchstone to test the worth of a literary work, but they disagreed over what made some literary works more real than others. Their contrasting definitions of reality resulted in different ways to construct the literary canon.

5. The tremendous interest in the theory of social representations led to many understandings and interpretations of Moscovici’s theory. The structuralist approach became the most well known, although it was not originally derived from Moscovici’s theory. Its success was due to its simple structure, to methodological rigour, and to its excellent suitability for experimental exploration. The socio-dynamic approach of the Geneva School is directly derived from Moscovici’s theory. Willem Doise’s organising symbolic principles are linked to specific social relations at the level of the individual, group, and society in psychology and sociology. The defining concept of the socio-cultural/anthropological approaches is the interdependent and unique relation between the inner world of humans (individuals, groups) and an outside world (other groups, ‘society’, culture). Imagination, images, and social imagery play central roles alongside other defining capacities of the human mind such as forms of thinking and knowing, language, and symbolic activities. The major theoretical contribution to the sociogenetic approach by Gerard Duveen and his followers was the emphasis on the dynamic structures of social representations. Communication and social representations condition one another. Interpersonal conversation/dialogue is a primary communication genre, and diffusion, propagation, and propaganda are three secondary genres in mass communication.

In the Conclusion, I reflect on the importance of adopting a generational, life-stage, and gendered lens to the study of transnational families. Close consideration of the interplay between physical, social, and phenomenological distance in transnational families demonstrates that the experience of distance is affectively mediated and inevitably relative, just as the meaning of relatedness is negotiated over time and across space. Since economic and social processes are always made sense of from particular social locations, the Conclusion underscores how attention to familial transformations is productive for understanding wider social change.

Chapter 2 focuses on the migration stories of two generations of Kenyans, situating them within wider family and social histories. Although only one person in a family typically moved, I argue that their migration is better understood as family migration, rather than economic migration. While economic gain and social possibilities are related, they are not the same. Rather, these migration projects marked the convergence of individual and familial aspirations, thereby re-centring kinship as a means of realising the futures of both those who moved and those who stayed. The imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin are important to this discussion and reveal how the United Kingdom was a largely imagined place at the time of migration, though not an arbitrary migration destination. Alongside this focus on place and space, the chapter begins to explore the role of time and temporality in the self- and life-making projects of migrants and their families.

In the preschool period the central activity is play. Through play young children become able to differentiate meaning from objects and actions. Play is therefore a way for children to acquire a conscious relation to the world that is revealed in how they come to plan play actions and create shared imagination. We have argued, following Vygotsky’s ideas, that in play children bring the most intimate and personal aspect of their lives into the realm of social life, in the same way that adults may do through art. We have also discussed how children rework their experience in play and how this contributes to their acquisition of everyday concepts that are a foundation for their concept formation in school. Caregivers may help children benefit from play activities by providing them with experiences that they may rework in play. Nonetheless, if caregivers enter young children’s play, they should be aware of how children create lifeworlds in play that may be interrupted by newcomers. We also argue for assessing children’s social situation of development by focusing on activities and not abilities and present a method developed for this purpose.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction and Schematism. In Heidegger’s view, these two sections inquire into the source of the categories that human understanding possesses a priori. Heidegger’s reading of both sections exhibits a characteristic move of his interpretive method, where he sees an innovative line of argument prioritizing the imagination emerge from a more traditional setup. The reconstruction also reveals some variety in how one can apply Heidegger’s interpretive method to the different parts of a text. Heidegger suggests that the traditional strand of argument is more prominent in the Metaphysical Deduction; while Kant attempts to derive the categories from the atemporal logic of the understanding, his references to the faculty of imagination at certain critical junctures reveal the breakdown of those attempts. By contrast, the emerging, innovative line of argument is more prominent in the Schematism, which quickly surpasses its traditional framing in order to offer a phenomenologically compelling account of how the categories, as ways of interpreting time (as constant, unidirectional, and so forth), inform our perceptual experience.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant with that of the German Idealists. The German Idealists attempt to unify Kant’s faculty psychology by uncovering a “common root” that is the source of sensibility and understanding, where the common root is a homogenous capacity that nevertheless can generate the other faculties. Insofar as these interpretations rely on telling a causal story, where one faculty causes others to arise, they return to a pre-critical position that Kant would reject; on Kant’s critical philosophy, we are precluded from extending categories like causality to our faculties for cognition, since such faculties do not appear sensibly in our experience. The chapter argues that, while Heidegger also seeks a common root, he avoids this problem by insisting that the common root is heterogenous. His common root – the imagination – is a unification of three basic capacities, rather than a single, deeper capacity that causes the others. Thus, Heidegger does not seek a foundation for metaphysics that is beyond the bounds of what Kant thinks we can know; he works with the cognitive capacities that Kant already identifies, but seeks to explain more fully the structural interrelationships between those capacities.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of the Transcendental Deduction and addresses the common objection that Heidegger’s interpretation cherry-picks evidence from Kant’s text, failing to address counterevidence adequately. The chapter argues that Heidegger both acknowledges and addresses the counterevidence cited by his critics. Specifically, Heidegger identifies that counterevidence as a component of a traditional strand of argument that is less compelling than other, more radical ideas in Kant’s text. On the traditional strand of argument, Kant attempts to spell out the a priori contact between sensibility and understanding by identifying a form of atemporal self-consciousness, apperception, that uses concepts to actively unify our sense experience. Heidegger is critical of this strand of argument because it remains unclear how apperception, construed as atemporal, can be unified with our temporal sense experience. How do two unlike things come together – time and not-time? Heidegger argues that one arrives at a more convincing account by developing the temporal dimension of apperception, where it holds up expectations for the future. This development helps one appreciate the deeper unity of our passive sensing of the present and our active anticipation of the future – a unity grounded in the temporal structure of the imagination, three interlaced temporal capacities that characterize the human being.

This chapter puts forward the thesis that fictional forms, and the imaginative reach they bring to thinking, serve as a kind of philosophical method for Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. It explores how the original use Wittgenstein makes of fiction and stories revitalizes conversations in the space between literature and philosophy. For Wittgenstein’s commitment to fiction as method, distinctively, allows him to sound out actualities and realities in the world. It is a uniquely truth-capable use of fiction that also highlights what novels, stories, films, performances, and other fictional forms are intrinsically capable of. The chapter begins by developing a contrast between Wittgenstein and Plato on the use of story. It continues into readings of central characters, figures, circumstances, and events in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations. The discussion concludes with reflections on two novelists, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, whose interest in giving everyday life narrative form illuminates the stakes of Wittgenstein’s commitment to story. The chapter more broadly asks central questions about how fictional forms put us in contact with consequential parts, pieces, and aspects of the world and how Wittgenstein’s philosophy paves a new path into this connection between fiction and life.

The imagination depends not on pictures but on experiences. When we imagine something we conjure up past experiences. This explains the vividness of the imagination, and how it can serve as a creative force. Collective imagination relies on movements and on shared props. Historical examples include German nationalism, social movements, the suffragette movement, movements for decolonization. Today we experience many movements only vicariously, for example, as we watch sports.