Abstract

Imagination is said to be a free faculty, the nature of which can be understood by stressing its independence from perceptual contexts and its subordination to the free choice of our will. The thesis of this essay is that this is not always and necessarily the case, and that a study of playful imagination compels us to observe how imagination has, on the one hand, a constraint on its content and, on the other, perceptual reasons that motivate it, regardless of our own decisions and free choices. Games of “pretenceµ often arise from reality and depend, in their possible execution, on the nature of the objects they use, a fact that allows us to grasp what playful imagination can teach us also in the field of artistic and expressive phenomena.