The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism ed. by Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok (review)

In his introduction, Gerad Gentry notes that "the imagination is important not only because it is central to one of the most productive and influential periods in the history of philosophy, but also because it represents a topic of substantial relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy" (2). Readers with contemporary interests in the imagination who are looking for a general introduction to its treatment by German Idealists and Romantics will be disappointed. Most of the essays in this volume presuppose familiarity with the respective philosophers and their technical vocabularies. Specialists, especially those who work on German Idealism, will find much of interest in this volume, which is divided into three parts: "Kant and the Imagination" (part 1), "The Imagination in Post-Kantian German Idealism" (part 2), and "The Imagination in German Romanticism" (part 3).

As a Kant scholar, I found the essays in part 1 especially rewarding. Each of these essays contributes to current debates in the secondary literature. In his contribution, Clinton Tolley addresses Kant's claim that the imagination is "a necessary ingredient in perception itself" and pursues a Sellarsian line of interpretation that takes the role of imagination to be that of generating complex images of objects. Tolley argues that while sensibility provides intuitions independently of the imagination and the understanding, the imagination generates images of intuitions, which are the representational content of perception. Tolley briefly gestures at the role of the imagination in generating a priori representations of space and time, a topic that Tobias Rosefeldt treats in significant detail in his contribution. While the recent scholarship on this topic has focused almost exclusively on the role of the imagination in generating the a priori representation of space, Rosefeldt focuses instead on the role of the transcendental imagination in generating the a priori representation of time, in particular, the representation of the direction of time, which makes his essay a particularly important one for the current debate. Günter Zöller argues that to properly understand the imagination's contribution to cognition, and especially the sense in which it is "productive" without being creative, we must pay attention to the metaphors that Kant uses to describe the function and status of the imagination, which come from biology and chemistry. This essay is a welcome contribution to the recent literature that highlights how Kant's interest in the emerging special sciences shaped the critical philosophy.

While the first three essays deal with the imagination's contribution to cognition, Keren Gorodeisky considers the free lawfulness of the imagination in aesthetic judgments. This is part of her overarching account of the unity of reason in Kant, one that preserves the fundamental differences between theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgments while also accounting for their underlying unity in terms of lawfulness. While she is right to emphasize that aesthetic judgments are made through feeling, and thus arise from a fundamentally different source than cognitive or practical judgments, I found it curious that she did not discuss the role of reflection in aesthetic judgments, which connects aesthetic judgments with reflective judgments in science. Even if one does not accept all of the details of her interpretation, she offers a compelling account of the centrality of the imagination for all aspects of human rationality.

The essays in part 2 address the way that later German Idealists extended and modified Kant's account of the imagination. Johannes Haag considers how Fichte's account of the imagination as "the ground of both the categories and objects of experience" nevertheless tries to preserve objectivity (109). Meghant Sudan examines Hegel's treatment of the imagination as unifying the receptive and reflective capacities of the mind. Gerad Gentry continues themes from Gorodeisky's essay and examines Hegel's treatment of the free lawfulness of the imagination as the key to the necessity and unity of reason.

In part 3, Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal address the role of the imagination in interpretation...