In this master’s thesis, our research is focused on the phenomena of imagination, judgement and sensus communis in order to disclose mental faculties that situate us in the political world. Paying attention on the nature of these faculties allows us to reopen a different horizon for political thinking, and to recover a dimension of political existence in which the supreme issues are subjected to public discourse, dialogue and common deliberation; moreover, in the thesis we give an insight on not only why deliberation is what enables us to collectively address the issues we are encountering in the contemporary world context, but also to think of these faculties as a strategy of how to achieve collectivity and collective thinking and how to begin to think politically. In the first part we discuss the faculty of imagination and its role in politics, whereby we describe various roles that imagination plays in politics, which can have both destructive and emancipatory potentials. In the second and third part of the thesis we discuss the faculty of judgement, the mental process of judging, and sensus communis, for which we turn to Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant, and emphasise their political application; in this part we also focus on the interaction between sensus communis and modern sciences and philosophy, arguing that the two have come into conflict which has led to the loss of sensus communis. In the last part, we focus on the rehabilitation of plurality and opinion as a moment of rehabilitation of the political, and on what it means to think politically.
|
