Thread by @wydna00

Extremely important book

Kant’s theory of the imagination usually receives little attention, but it’s the key to the Critique of Judgement due to the role Kant assigns to it in Reflective Judgment, which is the mechanism by which intuitions are compared and generalized into cognitive concepts

In Kant’s system Judgment is either Determinative, producing knowledge by subsuming objects under concepts, or Reflective, producing concepts through the comparison of a particular intuition with others. Imagination is the faculty which carries out this schematizing of concepts

The two modes of Judgment for Kant work reciprocally to elaborate systematic complexes of interrelated concepts, and Kant designates this process as Technics. Such systems of concepts are called Science. This is where Heidegger’s theories of technology originate.

Imagination for Kant is the faculty which produces intuitions by binding together the inchoate sensory manifold into phenomenon which it represents to us within the temporally structured domain of inner-sense. Likewise it compares these to represent cognitive concepts to us

What’s often missed is that Imagination is identical to the Faculty of Representation itself. That is, the faculty responsible for producing images. Or what in Memory Art was called Emblems, which were organized into “Places” or “Loci,” or as Aristotle calls them, Topoi. Topics

For Agricola, Ramus, and Bacon, Loci comprise the internal structure of Subjects. “Invention” in Rhetoric is the process of using the Topics as a map to the discover and organize the essential information about subjects by which they may be dialectically compared

https://twitter.com/wydna00/status/1481995080923852807

In the New Science, humanist natural historians collect information about phenomenon using increasingly sophisticated methods of note-taking, cross referencing, and classification: Commonplace Books. The “Places” being subject matter headings on exactly this same model