Reclaiming the Imagination

There are 51 selections in this book, and none of them addresses directly the subject of teaching writing. Yet all of them consider how we make sense of the world - how we learn and know. Reading these selections by artists, philosophers, and scientists, we discover that our own questions about knowing are perennial ones - that they have long troubled and fascinated others involved in the business of making meaning.

This book is meant to guide that discovery, and to help sustain and embolden us in a common philosophical enterprise: reclaiming the imagination. Berthoff's selections scintillate, individually and collectively. She draws from many sources, among them Rudolf Arnheim, Kenneth Burke, Susanne Langer, L.S. Vygotsky, I.A. Richards, Alfred North Whitehead, W.H. Auden, C.S. Peirce, Owen Barfield, Walker Percy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Clifford Geertz, Jane Addams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Klee, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ingmar Bergman, and Doris Humphrey.