After a long hiatus, psychology and philosophy are returning to formal study of imagination. While excellent work is being done in the current environment, this article argues for a stronger thesis than usually adopted. Imagination is not just a peripheral feature of cognition or a domain for aesthetic research. It is instead the core operating system or cognitive capacity for humans and has epistemic and therapeutic functions that ground all our sense-making activities. A sketch of imagination as embodied cognition is offered, followed by suggestions of how to organize imagination studies into a more rigorous science-humanities research area.
Keywords: Affective neuroscience; Cognition; Creativity; Embodied cognition; Evolutionary psychology; Imagination; Mythopoetic; Philosophy of mind; Therapeutics.
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