hand files & rasps
will imagination and reason babbitt croce and the problem of reality
p will imagination and reason sets forth a new understanding of reality and knowledge with far reaching implications for the study of man and society . employing a systematic approach claes ryn goes to the philosophical depths to rethink and reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences . he shows that will and imagination together constitute our basic outlook on life and that reason derives its material and general orientation from the interaction between them . p the imaginative master minds novelists poets composers painters and others powerfully affect the sensibility and direction of society . sometimes a distorting self serving willfulness at the base of their visions draws civilization including reason into dangerous illusion . more penetrating and balanced vision and rationality spring from a different quality of will . ryn explains the kind of interplay between will imagination and reason that is conducive to a deepened sense of reality and to intellectual understanding . he argues that human life and self knowledge are inescapably historical . in developing his dialectical view of intellect he draws from irving babbitt benedetto croce and other philosophers to refute positivistic formalistic and ahistorical theories of knowledge and to develop his alternative . p advancing a systematic epistemological argument ryn throws much new light on the nature of reason but also on central issues of ethics and aesthetics . this trenchant and original work is indispensable to philosophers social political and cultural theorists literary scholars and historians .