Feeling and Imagination in Art, Science, and Technology
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this seminar on creativity across art, science, and technology, examining how both fields depend on feeling as well as cognition. The course studies imagination through concepts like idealization and consummation, asking what gives aesthetic meaning to scientific and technical work as well as to literature and the arts. Readings draw from philosophy, psychology, and literary texts, and the seminar format centers on discussion of these sources rather than lectures. Materials are provided as part of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, free to access with no certificate offered. The course suits students interested in the overlap between the humanities and the sciences, particularly how emotional and imaginative faculties shape work usually treated as purely rational, such as engineering design or scientific theorizing.