The Philosophy of Imagination and Its Enlightenment on the Construction of Children's Imagination Ecology
In the Western rationalist tradition of mind-body dualism initiated by Plato,imagination is regarded as the lowest-ranking state of mind,mediating between sensibility and understanding.Kant put forward a new concept of imagination as"transcendental"ability,which makes imagination logically the potential basis of experience construction.Throughout the 20th century,the phenomenological philosophy of imagination initiated by Husserl conducted a more thorough study of imagination in a wide ontological sense,in which imagination is seen as a constitutive force for presenting and creating reality.Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty broke through the philosophy of consciousness and opened up a new path to the ontology of imagination by studying the material(elemental)imagination of the body in its initial contact with the world in childhood.Children's imagination is the process of establishing a deep and original interactive relationship between the body and the world and continuously generating meaning.These studies inspire us to believe that children's education urgently needs to establish an ontological value orientation of imagination,protect the time and space of children's imagination,support the vivid presentation of imagination in children's play,and thus construct a good imagination ecology for children.