Imagination plays a central role in key debates across a range of philosophical subjects including philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. What is imagination, and how can we best account for its nature? How does imagination relate to other mental states like belief, desire, perception, and memory? What role does it play in epistemic, creative, and ethical contexts?

In this excellent and wide-ranging survey of imagination, Amy Kind addresses these questions and more, with a focus on key topics including:

• three leading theories of imagination
• the importance of imagination for decision-making, planning, and knowledge acquisition
• the connection between imagination and creativity
• the role of imagination in our engagement with fiction, and several puzzles to which this engagement gives rise
• how imagination contributes to our understanding of others
• the ethical assessment of imaginative activities, and particularly the activity of fantasizing
• The future of imagination.

With the addition of chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary of key terms, Imagination is essential reading not only for those studying imagination for the first time but also for more advanced students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, aesthetics, and ethics.

Amy Kind is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, USA. Her many books relating to imagination or consciousness include the following Routledge volumes: Philosophy of Mind: The Basics (2020), What is Consciousness? A Debate (with Daniel Stoljar, 2023), Philosophy of Mind: Fifty Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments (with Torin Alter and Robert Howell, 2024), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (editor, 2016), Epistemic Uses of Imagination (edited with Christopher Badura, 2021), and Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (editor, 2019).