Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin

May – August / December 2016

Phenomenology of Productive Imagination

This book-length project addresses the scope and limits of productive imagination by focusing on how productive imagination has been conceptualized in the history of phenomenology. Central attention is granted to Husserl’s, Scheler’s, Heidegger’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Sartre’s, Bachelard’s, and Ricœur’s contributions. Productive imagination, conceived as a general capacity to intend irreal configurations of meaning which despite their irreality augment and transfigure the surrounding world, is conceptualized within four general fields: those of artistic, epistemological, poetic, and socio-political imagination. The general goal is to demonstrate that the far-reaching differences between cultural worlds largely rest upon diverse intersubjective accomplishments of productive phantasy.

Saulius Geniusas is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research is mainly focused on phenomenology and hermeneutics. Before moving to Hong Kong, Geniusas was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at James Madison University. Geniusas studied philosophy at Vilnius University, McMaster University, The University of Cologne and the New School for Social Research, where he defended his dissertation in 2008. Geniusas is the author of The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Springer, 2012) and some forty articles in various journals and anthologies. Currently, phenomenology of imagination and phenomenology of pain constitute his main research interests.