Sunday, December 04, 2005

Blog site name...

A reader of my blog asked why Imagnatio was chosen as its name. I will let Michael Beaney in Thought and Experience: Themes in the Philosophy of Mind offer a brief explanation:
Etymologically, 'imagination' derives from the Latin word imaginatio, while 'fantasy' and 'fancy' derive from the ancient Greek term phantasia. In the works of Plato and Aristotle, phantasia meant the power of apprehending or experiencing phantasmata ('phantasms'). Arguably, what phantasma originally meant was an 'appearance' - an occurrence of something appearing to be such-and-such, as when the sun looks to us as being only a foot across. But even in Aristotle's work, it was also used to mean 'mental image', which is how it was subsequently understood. Phantasia came to be translated by imaginatio and phantasma by imago in Latin, preserving the etymological and conceptual connection here, although the original Greek terms were also used in their transliterated form (i.e. employing the Latin rather than Greek alphabet, as I have done here) alongside their Latin correlates. In the seventeenth century, as Latin lost its place as the official language of philosophy, the terms that replaced phantasia and imaginatio in English were 'fantasy' - or 'fancy' or 'phantasy' - and 'imagination'. In this initial period of English usage, there seems to have been no established distinction between the two terms. In his Leviathan of 1651, for example, Hobbes claimed that what 'the Latins call imagination ... the Greeks call ... fancy' (I, ii). By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the distinction between fantasy and imagination had more or less settled down into its current sense. In his Dissertations Moral and Critical of 1783, James Beattie wrote: 'According to the common use of words, Imagination and Fancy are not perfectly synonymous. They are, indeed, names for the same faculty; but the former seems to be applied to the more solemn, and the latter to the more trivial, exertions of it. A witty author is a man of lively Fancy; but a sublime poet is said to possess a vast imagination' (quoted in Engell 1981, 172).

No comments: