Reclaiming the Imagination: Creativity as a Form of Knowledge: A Live, Online Zoom Lecture with Dr Stephen Asma, author of “On Monsters”

The advantages of our scientific era are undeniable, we also lost something when Modernism relegated art, religion, and the imagination to the realms of fantasy, wishful thinking, and frivolity. In this lecture Professor Stephen Asma will reclaim the imagination as a mental faculty and embodied source of knowledge. Creativity and imagination are forms of investigation that yield knowledge about our external physical world, our social world, and our internal psychological world. This illustrated lecture will argue for the primacy of a mytho-poetic way of knowing. Professor Asma is author of ten books, including The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago), and On Monsters (Oxford).

Stephen Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a Senior Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture. Asma is the author of ten books, including The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (Harvard Univ. Press, April 2019), Why We Need Religion (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018), The Evolution of Imagination (Univ. of Chicago, 2017), On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009) and The Gods Drink Whiskey (HarperOne, 2005). He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Aeon magazine.

$8