Metaphysical imagination

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Metaphysical imagination is a term in contemporary philosophy for the use of imaginative perception to grasp or “intuit” aspects of ultimate reality that lie beyond empirical description. The expression was popularised by the Scottish philosopher Ronald W. Hepburn, who argued that certain encounters with landscape prompt a “disclosure of how the world ultimately is.”^[1] Since the 1990s the concept has been taken up in environmental aesthetics, analytic metaphysics, theological aesthetics and educational theory.

Hepburn describes metaphysical imagination as a reflective mode of seeing in which the mind “reads” wider patterns of being—cosmic order, finitude, sublimity—into what is perceived.^[2] Subsequent writers broaden the notion to cover creative model-building in analytic metaphysics,^[3] sacramental and theological vision^[4][5] and pedagogical strategies in [[aesthetic education.^[6]

Hepburn’s original papers placed metaphysical imagination at the centre of nature appreciation, challenging art-centred models of the aesthetic.^[2] His approach influenced later work in environmental aesthetics, where imagination is now viewed as one of the “non-cognitive” orientations that complement scientific knowledge.^[7]

Theologians in the Radical Orthodoxy movement adopted Hepburn’s terminology to describe how beauty mediates between creaturely forms and divine being. John Betz links the “metaphysical imagination” to an analogical poetics that discerns transcendent meaning in sensible forms.^[8] Catherine Pickstock reads Thomas Aquinas as requiring an imaginative return from abstraction to sensory particulars, thereby joining epistemology to metaphysics.^[9]

In analytic philosophy the phrase is used more loosely for the role of imaginative model-building in large-scale metaphysical systems. Peter Godfrey-Smith argues that such systems resemble scientific models: they deliberately simplify reality in order to illuminate its structure.^[10]

A growing body of literature applies the concept to environmental education, proposing classroom exercises that foster “serious” rather than “trivial” nature appreciation by inviting students to imagine deep time, cosmic scale or ecological interdependence.^[11]

Proponents claim that metaphysical imagination avoids both naive realism and solipsistic fantasy by remaining answerable to perceptual experience.^[2] Critics reply that the faculty risks projecting subjective meaning onto nature or theological doctrines without epistemic warrant.^[12] Analytic metaphysicians have also questioned whether imaginative virtues such as simplicity or elegance track truth.^[13]

• Active imagination
• Aesthetic cognitivism