Simile and allusion are two rhetorical aspects that have been taken into consideration by the scholars of rhetoric since long time ago. Some of the Iranian poets have used the capacities of the Persian language and integrated these aspects to create a modern rhetoric which in this study is introduced as rhetorical simile. The objective of the present study is the investigation of this rhetoric ...

Imagination is generally regarded as a very powerful and advanced cognitive ability. In this paper we propose a modelling framework for what we call functional imagination: the ability of an embodied agent to simulate its own behaviors, predict their sensory-based consequences, and extract behavioural benefit from doing so. We identify five key components of architectures for functional imagina...

The eminent mathematician Felix Klein wrote, in his intimate history of nineteenth-century mathematics, that “mathematics is not merely a matter of understanding but quite essentially a matter of imagination” (cf. Klein [1979], p. 207). Klein was responding to the turbulent trajectory of imagination’s role inmathematics during the nineteenth century, which beganwith Gaspard Monge teaching new w...

In the early modern era the notion of imagination was made responsible for phenomena which were later explained in terms of embryology, genetics, psychology, bacteriology or other scientific disciplines. Images, often seated in the upper abdomen (hypochondriac region) or the womb (hysteria), were regarded as powerful influences on material reality. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteent...

Our study investigates the process of topic comprehension in comparative sentences and the relationship between this process and the word order of topic and vehicle. Our experiment used a meaningfulness decision task with three conditions: no-vehicle sentence (e.g. a word hurts someone), vehicle-after-topic sentence (e.g. a word, like a weapon, hurts someone), and vehicle-before-topic sentence ...

As the title of his book suggests, McGinn presents an account of the human imagination and its role in such phenomena as mental imagery, dreams and the meaning of language. As he sees it, imagination is a central part of what distinguishes human beings from other animals--we are, as it were 'Homo imaginans' [5]. At the same time, however, contemporary analytical philosophy of mind has devoted l...