Kant’s Faculty Of Imagination And Its Epistemic Function

Abstract

The very suggestion of giving knowledge function to imagination sounds strange. One might say that imagination is helpful in giving rise to tremendous works of fiction, but imagination’s role is not limited to just fictional knowledge but also knowledge of deep elusive sort and matters of practical relevance where it helps us to focus on overcoming the upcoming dangers by raising attention to possibilities. Imagination deals with what could have been the case or what is possible, and how would things have been if not what they actually are. Contemporary philosophers have been keen to understand the role that imagination plays in the constitution of knowledge, especially in the knowledge that deals with the evaluation and investigation of the truth value of propositions that dwells in the realm of possibility, necessity, impossibility, contingency etc.… This knowledge is a part of the modal epistemology in modal logic. Studying the scope and range of modal knowledge is modal epistemology. Since, Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination, philosophers have started to take imagination as an important faculty in the process of cognition rather than just “a play of fanciful images unfit for serious thought”[1]. In this paper my aim is to understand Kant’s theory of Imagination and to focus on the epistemic role of Imagination, in order to do so I will also have a look into how contemporary debates on imagination are inspired by the works of Kant. I will look into how imagination has a significant role to play in modal epistemology and why its role cannot be eschewed in modal logic. In doing so the main aim of this paper is to figure out imagination’s epistemic role in the formulation of knowledge.