This paper continues to explore the relationship between the imagination and learning. It has been claimed by Maxine Greene, amongst others, that imagination is the most important of the cognitive capacities for learning; the reason being that 'it permits us to give credence to alternative realities'. However little work has been done on what constitutes this capacity for the imagination. This paper draws on Husserl and Wittgenstein to frame a model of imagination that derives from the perspective of the 'transcendental phenomenology' of Husserl. The claim is made that by learning to be in the world in certain ways we must be able to construct imagined worlds with their own logics and presentations. This claim is supported by a discussion of the parameters required for owning and accepting to the self sensory and cognitive perceptions and beliefs. Imagination is also a necessary condition for the understanding of empathy; of grasping what it is like be another person. In this sense imagination can be better grasped through the category of ontology rather than epistemology. It can also, on the basis of ontology, be argued that understanding and acknowledging other cultures is a matter of being, imaginatively, in the other world. Some implications for approaches to teaching and learning are outlined.

Life, Work and Learning: Practice in Postmodernity marks a significant advance in the reconceptualisation and re-evaluation of practice-based learning. It does this by drawing on a critique of past and current theories of work-based learning, a reevaluation of the epistemology contained in postmodernism, and a strongly articulated case for the importance of contextualisation and of 'cohesive organicism'.The book has many strong elements, but amongst the strongest are the excellent discussions of the development of Lemert's notion of 'strategic postmodernism' in the context of situated practice, the role of judgement in workplace learning and the relationship between language and experience. These are the elements which I will focus on in this discussion. It should be noted, however, that there is a wealth of further material in the book including enlightening detailed analysis of diverse practitioner interviews.To many traditional educationists, the idea of celebrating training as a sophisticated and humanistic form of knowledge acquisition would come as something of a shock. Yet, it is made clear that the conditions of practical postmodernism are precisely those where the formal and informal learning meld; where the distinction between theory and practice dissolves, along with other dualisms of the post-Cartesian legacy.The authors mount a strong case that traditional understandings of education associated with the 'front-end model' have been challenged from a number of directions. Firstly, from Dewey onwards, that the epistemological basis of learning has shifted and cannot sustain the primacy of theory over practice. Secondly, that the notion of a coherent self as the subject of learning and the use of language has changed. Thirdly, that post-industrial society, linked to 'turbo-capitalism' has created social conditions that require new conditions of change and flexibility. And, fourthly, that globalisation and other factors have created the conditions where competing epistemologies and value systems must co-exist in the same social and political contexts.In some respects, the claim to a practice-based epistemology is a return to Heraclitus rather than the phronesis of Aristotle; to the denial of the split between reason and action or in favour of an organicism of feeling and sense. Or, as Heraclitus might have expressed it, a unity of phenomena and essence leading to a unity of thought and action.

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