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In his fascinating study, The Conversion of Imagination, Matthew Maguire offers notes that "imagination is not always best understood as an emancipatory faculty that moves separately from or against scientific rationality." Rather, citing the work of Amos Funkenstein, Maguire suggests that "a variant of exalted imagination - that is, one that seeks to construct or make a reality from admittedly imprecise or 'imperfect' but nonetheless 'real' measurement of matter in motion - was a historical precondition of those very ambitions in late medieval and early modern Europe. A 'constructive theory of knowledge' allows for the possibility that the forms and boundaries of our political lives together are similarly constructed, as Hobbes believed. For Funkenstein, this way of thinking achieves a new scope in Vico, in whose writings 'our capacity to imagine gods, our constructive imagination, is the only driving force of history.'"
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 23, 2006 at 02:59 PM
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