Although productive imagination has played a highly significant role in (post-) Kantian
philosophy there have been very few book-length studies explicitly dedicated to its analysis.
In his new book Saulius Geniusas develops a phenomenology of productive imagination while
relying on those resources that we come across in Edmund Husserl's Max Scheler's Martin
Heidegger's Ernst Cassirer's Miki Kiyoshi's Jean-Paul Sartre's Maurice Merleau-Ponty's and
Paul Ricoeur's writings while also engaging in present-day philosophical discussions of the
imagination. Investigating the relation between imagination and embodiment affectivity
perception language selfhood and intersubjectivity the book provides a phenomenological
conception of productive imagination which is committed to basic phenomenological principles
and which is sensitive to how productive imagination has been conceptualized in the history of
phenomenology. Against such a background Geniusas develops a new conception of productive
imagination: It is a basic modality of intentionality that indirectly shapes the human
experience of the world by forming the contours of action intuition knowledge and
understanding. It is not so much a blind and indispensable function of the soul but an art
concealed in the body for it springs out of instincts drives desires and needs. The author
demonstrates unexpected ways in which phenomenology of productive imagination enriches our
understanding of embodied subjectivity.
