Image, Imagination, and Cognition

Christoph Lüthy is professor in the history of philosophy and science at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He has mainly published on issues and key personalities in the history of matter theories. He is particularly interested in the visual aspect of such theories, which he has examined in essays and books on Giordano Bruno, René Descartes, David Gorlaeus and the history of atomism. Claudia Swan is professor of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL (USA). She has published extensively on northern European visual culture 1400-1700, art and science, the history of collecting, and the history of the imagination. Her forthcoming book is on Encounters with the Exotic in Early Modern Holland.Paul J.J.M. Bakker is professor of medieval and Renaissance philosophy at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His research focuses on the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy, from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. He edited John Buridan’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (books I–II and III–IV) (Brill 2015 & 2016).Claus Zittel teaches German literature and philosophy at the Universities of Stuttgart (Germany), and Olsztyn (Poland), and is Deputy Director of the Stuttgart Research Center for Text Studies. He has published monographs, translations and many articles on Early Modern Philosophy, including Theatrum Philosophicum. Descartes und die Rolle ästhetischer Formen in der Wissenschaft (Akademie 2009).

"This book offers a wealth of thematic contributions concerning the status and role of images and the broader conception of human imagination, primarily in Renaissance and early modern Europe [...] in sum, Image, Imagination, and Cognition will be valuable for historians of science who possess a strong interest in images and a voracious appetite for philosophical aspects of imagination and cognition." Stefan Zieme, Humboldt University Berlin, in Isis 110.4"The main task of Image, Imagination, and Cognition is to understand the variety of characteristics that the imagination accrued in the early modern period. Between 1500 and 1700 the relations among images, imagination, and cognition becomes a crucial topic for philosophers, artists, mathematicians, and astronomers [...] The essays collected in the volume trace the story of the imagination in early modern times through three perspectives: a philosophical inquiry (from Pomponazzi to Kant); an analysis of the role ascribed to this faculty in artistic creation; and the epistemological debate about the use of images in mathematical and astronomical treatises." Lucia Pappalardo, Università degli Studi di Salerno, in Renaissance Quarterly LXXIII.1 (doi:10.1017/rqx.2019.571)

• Notes on the EditorsNotes on the ContributorsList of IllustrationsIntroductionPaul Bakker, Christoph Lüthy, and Claudia Swan1 Imagination, Images and (Im)MortalitySander W. De Boer2 ‘Imaginatio’ and Visual Representation in Twelfth-Century Cosmology and Astronomy: Ibn al-Haytham, Stephen of Pisa (and Antioch), (Ps.) Māshāʾallāh, and (Ps.) Thābit ibn QurraBarbara Obrist3 Minerva in the Forge of Vulcan: Ingegno, Fatica, and Imagination in Early Florentine Art TheoryDavid Zagoury4 Bernardino Telesio on Spirit, Sense, and ImaginationLeen Spruit5 Giovan Battista Della Porta’s ImaginationSergius Kodera6 Imagination in the Chamber of Sleep: Karel van Mander on Somnus and MorpheusChristine Göttler7 Agere Corporaliter: Otto Vaenius’s Theory of the ImaginationRalph Dekoninck, Agnès Guiderdoni, Aline Smeesters8 Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Views on Mathematical ImaginationGuy Claessens9 What Does a Diagram Prove that Other Images Do Not? Images and Imagination in the Kepler-Fludd ControversyChristoph Lüthy10 Aristotelian Proportioned Images and Descartes’s Dynamic ImaginingDennis L. Sepper11 Schematism, Imagination, and Pure Intuition in KantSybille KrämerIndex Nominum