The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination

The essays in this book respond to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's recent call to explore the relationship between the evolution of the universe and the process of self-individuation in the ontopoietic unfolding of life. The essays approach the sensory manifold in a number of ways. They show that theories of modern science become a strategy for the phenomenological study of works of art, and vice versa. Works of phenomenology and of the arts examine how individual spontaneity connects with the design(s) of the logos - of the whole and of the particulars - while the design(s) rest not on some human concept, but on life itself. Life's pliable matrices allow us to consider the expansiveness of contemporary science, and to help create a contemporary phenomenological sense of cosmos.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (born February 28, 1923) is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor (since its inception in the late 1960s) of the book series Analecta Husserliana, presently published by Springer. Patricia Trutty-Coohill's initial work on Leonardo da Vinci focused on the direct experience of physical qualities of individual artworks and their varied receptions and interpretations. This led naturally to her studies in phenomenology of art and of the creative process. Her catalogue of Leonardo drawings (with Carlo Pedretti) was published by Giunti; her various works on Leonardo, Michelangelo, and on the contemporary arts appear in e.g. Achademia Leonardi Vinci and the Analecta Husserliana. She is Professor Emerita of Art History, Siena College, Loudonville NY.