Both intensional and extensional explanations of linguistic meaning involve notions -- linguistic roles and referential relations, respectively -- which are not perspicuous and seem to evade satisfactory explanations themselves. Following Sellars, I make a move away from semantic explanation of the designation relation and of linguistic roles toward an explanation which relates to the use of linguistic and perceptual signs (i.e., pragmatics). In doing so, concerns are raised that seem to be more closely associated with epistemology and phenomenology than with the philosophy of language or logic. In particular, experience is taken to be intentional, i.e., to have a propositional content which is irreducible to the causal order. Along with intentionality, certain essentially autobiographical conditions of experience are neglected in typical conceptions of the problem of meaning. They are reintroduced here. Further, I take as a presupposition the pragmatist notion that each of our conceptual schemes emerges from a community of persons, rather than from individuals. What follows from the preceding starting points is a picture of incomplete personhood in which persons are seen as being inclined both toward experiential wholes which have conceptual content and toward establishing and unifying beliefs which resolve doubts. Because of the conditions of experience constitutive of, and peculiar to, personhood and the necessity of the community for individual inquiry, the notion of incomplete personhood has a central position in my pragmatist conception of the problem of meaning. By emphasizing the pragmatistic conditions of experience and the active role of persons in finding objects and in continually reaching toward a final complete picture, the problems related to objectivity are found to be peripheral to a conception of meaning which captures the practice(s) of persons' living object-directed lives. The result is a new way of conceiving of the problem of meaning. / Master of Arts

In this dissertation, I argue for a novel interpretation of Kant’s faculty of the imagination. In addition to providing the prepared sensible manifold, I contend that the imagination also demonstrates a formal capacity – the ability to provide its own lawfulness. This position I term the ‘Dual Role of the Imagination,’ as a faculty capable of providing both form and content. Although the imagination’s products remain determined by the understanding in regular cognition, I demonstrate that aesthetic judgments provide instances where the imagination provides its own lawfulness inspired by beautiful objects in nature and fine art. These beautiful objects, when interacting with the free imagination engaged in harmonious play represent distinct points where nature demonstrates certain rational signs, thereby providing opportunity for the imagination to shape its own forms that demonstrate the possibility of rationality within an otherwise disinterested nature. That is, beautiful objects give the imagination the occasion to reflect on and produce a view of nature as if rationally ordered, or in accord with Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness. To fully grasp the value of aesthetic judgment within Kant’s Critical framework, I argue, the imagination must be seen in its formal capacity since only a faculty capable of forming its own lawfulness that also remains tied to sensibility can bridge the gap between nature and reason. Therefore, this project serves as a defense of the imagination as a formal faculty towards the end of bridging the ‘incalculable gulf’ Kant indicates in the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In addition to the historical research, I turn to contemporary scholarship on Kant in terms of his aesthetics and its value to his theory of cognition. There are two prevailing approaches to Kantian aesthetics in contemporary scholarship – the cognitive approach and the interpretive approach. In the cognitive approach, aesthetics is viewed in terms of its value to future cognitions. That is, aesthetic judgments are useful insofar as they either deepen future cognitions, provide new connections for our cognitions, or reveal sensible content that goes beyond our existing cognitions. Most proponents of the cognitive approach have little to say about the power of the imagination within Kant’s transcendental framework, seeing it as an appendage to our conceptual faculty, the understanding. This provides a deflationary reading of the imagination since its products are only relevant to cognition and are not necessarily considered the results of a free and independent faculty. The interpretive approach favors an expanded view of the imagination, allowing it to exist free from the determination of the understanding in cases of aesthetic judgment. Supporters of this view consider the products of the imagination as exceeding regular cognition and opening new fields of knowledge beyond what we commonly experience. Examples of these new fields include the political, societal, historical, and aesthetic – domains of knowledge we may consider to be of a different kind than yielded through common cognition. While expanding the imagination, I argue that this view is needlessly inflationary, providing far more avenues for inquiry than Kant intended for the imagination. That is, while the imagination can demonstrate the possibility of nature as rationally ordered, and thereby span the gulf between nature and reason, this perspective is merely one amongst many possible perspectives. It does not privilege or emphasize a view that Kant clearly intended for his aesthetics. Further, I argue, that this expansion of the imagination risks severing it into two distinct faculties, since it requires a hard division between its activities in the First Critique and Third Critique. This dissertation provides a moderate path between the two prevailing approaches in Kantian scholarship. I seek to offer a reading of the imagination in its dual role within Kant’s transcendental framework. Rather than limiting the imagination’s aesthetic activities to cognition or expanding its capacities to obscure their true value, I focus on strengthening the connection between aesthetic judgment and its place as a bridge between nature and reason. I do this through the imagination as a formal, as well as sensible, faculty. On one hand, the imagination maintains its position as a faculty capable of touching the sensible world. On the other, it is capable of forming its own lawfulness inspired by this connection through natural and artistic beauty. As such, it is the imagination that is shown to be key to achieving Kant’s goal of the Third Critique, bridging the ‘incalculable gulf’ – opening a view of nature as amenable to our rational ends. / Philosophy

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<P> This dissertation argues that the imagination takes on a new importance in the current moment of "financialization": the expansion of financial power both broadly around the world and deeply into everyday life. I suggest that a dialectic theory of imagination and value is necessary to understand this shift. Following an introduction laying out this problematic, chapter two looks at the career of the Western notions of the imagination up to and including the 191h century, positing that it has been an important aspect of the rise of modernity, capitalism and colonialism, but one whose political salience diminished with the rise of discourses of value. In chapter three I turn to theories of imagination in the twentieth century. But I suggest that none of these theories sufficiently accounts for the economic. In order to do so, I turn in chapter four to the notion of value, arguing that we are better equipped to understand economic value under capitalism when we see its relationship to other social values (ethical, aesthetic, political, etc.). To do so, I revisit Marx's "Labour Theory of Value" and, after narrating the rise and fall of this influential idea, I discuss the work of current social theorists seeking to revivify this concept for new times. In the fifth chapter I delineate how capitalism as a system subordinates social values to economic value and how finance is both the highest articulation and a key moment of this process. I conclude by mapping this theoretical approach through a reading of children's play with Pokemon cards, arguing that financialization demands we revisit questions of structure and agency in cultural studies. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<P> No evaluation of the Renaissance-its culture and texts-is complete without understanding early modem imagination. Yet many modem critics have understated or misunderstood the imagination's importance to the English Renaissance. Misconceptions arise, in part, because our current understanding of imagination has been influenced by Romantic theorists, whose definitions of imagination differ radically from early modem beliefs about the functions and capabilities of the faculty. A comprehensive study of early modem imagination is therefore essential. This thesis undertakes the timely task of analyzing the significance of Renaissance definitions and characteristics of imagination as they are posited in early modem philosophical and medical texts. To early modem English theorists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and Margaret Cavendish, the physical location of imagination determines its function and significance, its potentially dangerous autonomy is a constant threat, the imagination can disastrously or advantageously influence the body, and it can justify textual novelty and creativity. Studying imagination is incomplete without understanding its expansion in literary texts, for in poetry, drama, and fictional narratives, authors self-consciously employ and debate the characteristics of imagination philosophers, physicians, and theologians were earnestly debating. In The Temple, George Herbert crafts his poetry and his text to metaphorically display and debate the physical position of imagination in the brain. Richard Brome's play, The Antipodes, questions the autonomy of imagination. Can the imagination be controlled, Brome asks, and by what? The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe's prose narrative, fleshes out early modem considerations of the imagination's impact on the body of the imaginant and others. Francis Quarles's Emblemes illustrates-literallyRenaissance debates about imagination's influence on originality and creativity. For, in their literary texts, early modem authors use their contemporaries' theories of imagination to justify and test their relationship with, and responsibility to, God, their readers, and themselves. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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<p>This dissertation is a critical examination of the fictional works of G.S. Lewis, focussing upon the concepts of reality, truth and perspective as they are expressed in the fiction. The discussion follows the narrative of each work in turn, thus orienting the reader by means of the works themselves, rather than by means of rubrics concerning their subjects or themes. The intent is to follow Lewis's precept, that the good reader should attend to any work of literature as something made as well as something said. The introduction surveys the development of Lewis's thought on the nature of reality and truth, and of the role of the imagination and the reason in apprehending these things. Evidence from Lewis's letters (including unpublished letters), essays, apologetics, addresses and autobiography is considered. A survey of the major criticism of Lewis's fiction is included in the introduction. A chapter of analytical discussion is then devoted to each of the books of the Ransom trilogy, to the Chronicles of Narnia as a series, and to Till We Rave Faces. </p> <p> Lewis came to believe in the existence of an ultimate, central Reality in the person of God, ln whom all lesser realities focus, and from whom they depend. He believed also in man's ability to perceive truth -- valid asssrtions concerning these realities -through the exercise of the reason, and adherence to the moral law. Mythopoeic and symbolic literature had, in Lewis's estimation, the unique ability to convey reality whole into the mind of the receptive reader. The concentration of this kind of literature upon unusual and unexpected subjects, he believed, could serve to correct the reader's perspective upon reality, by furnishing the imagination with those materials which the implicit materialism and naturalism of much of modern "realistic" literature might have kept from the reader's consideration. Lewis's own fantasies -- a science-fiction trilogy, seven fairy-tales, and a novel based on the old myth of Cupid and Psyche -- are unified by their preoccupation with the importance of an undistorted perspective upon reality, the possibility of perceiving truth, and of distinguishing truth from error, of the dependence of all reality upon an ultimate, central Reality, and of the possibility of knowing that Reality by entering into a personal relationship with God. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Memory is a recurring theme in Jean-Paul Sartre's work. However, Sartre never formulated an explicit theory of memory. When he did discuss memory he reached two conflicting conclusions: (1) in his theory of imagination and in his early text The Transcendence of the Ego memory is presented as a mimetic power and memories are repetitions of the past; (2) in his other texts, among them Being and Nothingness, memory is portrayed as a creative force that reconstructs experience rather than repeats it. I argue that Sartre held two conflicting notions of memory since he thought that recollection as a whole--understood either in mimetic or reconstructive terms--stifles consciousness and obstructs freedom. In the dissertation I explore the ways in which memory becomes responsible, according to Sartre, for the constitution of selfhood and for the creation of a solid character with a defined history, which eventually leads to the evasion of the free agency of consciousness. Against the mimetic and reconstructive models of memory I pose the notion of "existential memory", which is not a term that Sartre himself used but which emerges from his work on human temporality. The notion of "existential memory" provides an opportunity to conceive of a possibility of relating to the past in an authentic manner, without objectifying it or losing sight of one's freedom. In response to the challenges raised by Sartre's concerns with bad faith, existential memory is a model of authenticity. / Philosophy