Imagination

Imagination PDF Author: Jim Davies
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643132881
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
We don’t think of imagination the way that we should. The word is often only associated with children, artists and daydreamers, but in reality, imagination is an integral part of almost every action and decision that we make. Simply put, imagination is a person’s ability to create scenarios in his or her head: this can include everything from planning a grocery list, to honing a golf swing, to having religious hallucinations. And while imagination has positive connotations, it can also lead to decreased productivity and cooperation, or worse, the continuous reliving of past trauma.The human brain is remarkable in its ability to imagine—it can imagine complex possible futures, fantasy worlds, or tasty meals. We can use our imaginations to make us relaxed or anxious. We can imagine what the world might be, and construct elaborate plans. People have been fascinated with the machination of the human brain and its ability to imagine for centuries. There are books on creativity, dreams, memory, and the mind in general, but how exactly do we create those scenes in our head? With chapters ranging from hallucination and imaginary friends to how imagination can make you happier and more productive, Jim Davies' Imagination will help us explore the full potential of our own mind.

Imagination

Imagination PDF Author: Jim Davies
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643132881
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
We don’t think of imagination the way that we should. The word is often only associated with children, artists and daydreamers, but in reality, imagination is an integral part of almost every action and decision that we make. Simply put, imagination is a person’s ability to create scenarios in his or her head: this can include everything from planning a grocery list, to honing a golf swing, to having religious hallucinations. And while imagination has positive connotations, it can also lead to decreased productivity and cooperation, or worse, the continuous reliving of past trauma.The human brain is remarkable in its ability to imagine—it can imagine complex possible futures, fantasy worlds, or tasty meals. We can use our imaginations to make us relaxed or anxious. We can imagine what the world might be, and construct elaborate plans. People have been fascinated with the machination of the human brain and its ability to imagine for centuries. There are books on creativity, dreams, memory, and the mind in general, but how exactly do we create those scenes in our head? With chapters ranging from hallucination and imaginary friends to how imagination can make you happier and more productive, Jim Davies' Imagination will help us explore the full potential of our own mind.

The Scientific Imagination

The Scientific Imagination PDF Author: Peter Godfrey-Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190212306
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The imagination, our capacity to entertain thoughts and ideas "in the mind's eye," is indispensable in science as elsewhere in human life. Indeed, common scientific practices such as modeling and idealization rely on the imagination to construct simplified, stylized scenarios essential for scientific understanding. Yet the philosophy of science has traditionally shied away from according an important role to the imagination, wary of psychologizing fundamental scientific concepts like explanation and justification. In recent years, however, advances in thinking about creativity and fiction, and their relation to theorizing and understanding, have prompted a move away from older philosophical perspectives and toward a greater acknowledgement of the place of the imagination in scientific practice. Meanwhile, psychologists have engaged in significant experimental work on the role of the imagination in causal thinking and probabilistic reasoning. The Scientific Imagination delves into this burgeoning area of debate at the intersection of the philosophy and practice of science, bringing together the work of leading researchers in philosophy and psychology. Philosophers discuss such topics as modeling, idealization, metaphor and explanation, examining their role within science as well as how they affect questions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language. Psychologists discuss how our imaginative capacities develop and how they work, their relationships with processes of reasoning, and how they compare to related capacities, such as categorization and counterfactual thinking. Together, these contributions combine to provide a comprehensive and exciting picture of the scientific imagination.

Science and Moral Imagination

Science and Moral Imagination PDF Author: Matthew J. Brown
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987678
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.

Imagination and Science in Romanticism

Imagination and Science in Romanticism PDF Author: Richard C. Sha
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

Imaginative Science Education

Imaginative Science Education PDF Author: Yannis Hadzigeorgiou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319295268
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book is about imaginative approaches to teaching and learning school science. Its central premise is that science learning should reflect the nature of science, and therefore be approached as an imaginative/creative activity. As such, the book can be seen as an original contribution of ideas relating to imagination and creativity in science education. The approaches discussed in the book are storytelling, the experience of wonder, the development of ‘romantic understanding’, and creative science, including science through visual art, poetry and dramatization. However, given the perennial problem of how to engage students (of all ages) in science, the notion of ‘aesthetic experience’, and hence the possibility for students to have more holistic and fulfilling learning experiences through the aforementioned imaginative approaches, is also discussed. Each chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the theoretical background of a specific imaginative approach (e.g., storytelling, ‘wonder-full’ science), reviews the existing empirical evidence regarding its role in the learning process, and points out its implications for pedagogy and instructional practices. Examples from physical science illustrating its implementation in the classroom are also discussed. In distinguishing between ‘participation in a science activity’ and ‘engagement with science ideas per se’, the book emphasizes the central role of imaginative engagement with science content knowledge, and thus the potential of the recommended imaginative approaches to attract students to the world of science.

Theology and the Scientific Imagination

Theology and the Scientific Imagination PDF Author: Amos Funkenstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691184267
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic thought shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with Funkenstein’s influential analysis of the seventeenth century’s “unprecedented fusion” of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pathbreaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.

The scientific imagination case studies

The scientific imagination case studies PDF Author: Gerald James Holton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description


Shaping Humanity

Shaping Humanity PDF Author: John Gurche
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300182023
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Describes the process by which the author uses knowledge of fossil discoveries and comparative ape and human anatomy to create forensically accurate representations of human beings' ancient ancestors.

Imagination of Science in Education

Imagination of Science in Education PDF Author: Michiel van Eijck
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400753926
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Researchers agree that schools construct a particular image of science, in which some characteristics are featured while others end up in oblivion. The result is that although most children are likely to be familiar with images of heroic scientists such as Einstein and Darwin, they rarely learn about the messy, day-to-day practice of science in which scientists are ordinary humans. Surprisingly, the process by which this imagination of science in education occurs has rarely been theorized. This is all the more remarkable since great thinkers tend to agree that the formation of images — imagination — is at the root of how human beings modify their material world. Hence this process in school science is fundamental to the way in which scientists, being the successful agents in/of science education, actually create their own scientific enterprise once they take up their professional life. One of the first to examine the topic, this book takes a theoretical approach to understanding the process of imagining science in education. The authors utilize a number of interpretive studies in both science and science education to describe and contrast two opposing forces in the imagination of science in education: epicization and novelization. Currently, they argue, the imagination of science in education is dominated by epicization, which provides an absolute past of scientific heroes and peak discoveries. This opens a distance between students and today’s scientific enterprises, and contrasts sharply with the wider aim of science education to bring the actual world of science closer to students. To better understand how to reach this aim, the authors offer a detailed look at novelization, which is a continuous renewal of narratives that derives from dialogical interaction. The book brings together two hitherto separate fields of research in science education: psychologically informed research on students’ images of science and semiotically informed research on images of science in textbooks. Drawing on a series of studies in which children participate in the imagination of science in and out of the classroom, the authors show how the process of novelization actually occurs in the practice of education and outline the various images of science this process ultimately yields.

Image and Reality

Image and Reality PDF Author: Alan J. Rocke
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226723356
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of “chemical structures,” both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as one of the central defining features of chemistry. In telling this fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields. Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.