ABSTRACT
This chapter explores and evaluates the particular significance of Ricoeur's contribution to a philosophy of imagination. Before Ricoeur's hermeneutic approach, most phenomenological accounts of imagination concentrated on its role as vision, as a special or modified way of seeing the world. Imagination was thus defined in terms of its relation to perception, be it positive or negative, continuous or discontinuous. Husserl described the act of imagining as a 'neutralized' mode of seeing, Sartre as an 'unrealized' mode of quasi-seeing, and Merleau-Ponty as a dialectical counterpart of the visible. The problem of semantic innovation remained unresolved for Sartre who argued in L'Imaginaire that imagination was condemned to an 'essential poverty'. Semantic innovation can point towards social transformation. The chapter examines three categories which broadly correspond to consecutive phases in the later philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: the symbolic imagination; the oneiric imagination; the poetic imagination.
