ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl considered imagining one of the key elements of his phenomenological method. This chapter aims to give an overview of some of the most important themes that have emerged and have been explored by phenomenological research into the imagination. Husserl begins his efforts to re-examine imagination in his 1904/05 lectures on “Phantasy and Image Consciousness. Genuine cases of imagining are, for Husserl, cases of sensory imagination. Imagining is, in the language of German philosophy, “intuitive.” Husserl’s investigations into the capacity of imagining to make manifest possibilities also supports his insistence on its epistemic function. Imagining provides intuitive evidence, evidence of possibilities, and is thus, to use the language of Ideas I, a “legitimizing source of cognition”. For Jean-Paul Sartre, the “imaginary,” not the ‘imagination,’ becomes central to an ontology of human existence and central to his existentialist account of freedom in particular. In his existentialist phenomenology, imagining explicitly becomes an expression of human freedom.
