Is an image merely an inferior copy of the actual thing? Is imagination simply an escape from reality? In both cases, Alfredo Ferrarin thinks not and, breaking classical assumptions that images are exclusively reproductions and imagination is a secondary faculty, this book provides a rich account of what images really are and what imagination can do.

Ferrarin begins by charting a history of the philosophy of imagination in the West, from antiquity to the present. With a lightness of touch throughout, he brings a broad range of thinkers into dialogue, from Aristotle, Kant and Freud to Musil, Gadda and Sendak. He then proceeds to examine the twofold nature of every image – the image itself and what it is an image of – before distinguishing between natural, artificial, mental and memory images. The final chapters probe the cognitive functions of imagination. Comparing and relating how we conceptualize imagination to how we think about the concept of reality, Ferrarin contends that, whilst it can be, imagination is not always a flight from reality; it is also a way of figuring out what is real.

In an age where the number of images we view daily is growing exponentially, A World Not of this World broadens our understanding not only of the nature of images and imagination, but of their power to transform the way we see the world.