This open access book rethinks the practical salience of imagination as intertwined with empathy. It focuses on the possibilities and limits of imagination and empathy with regards to humans and non-human animals. It explores the converges and the tensions inherent in comparing or comparatively analyzing both groups. The contributions in this volume include accounts of imagination from different areas of philosophy, including: feminist and political epistemology, (critical) phenomenology, animal studies, political theory, philosophy of mind, critical studies of disability, the philosophy of race, and ethics. This volume is of interest to researchers and students of philosophy interested in diverse, posthuman account of one of philosophy's central questions, imagination. 

Carlo Salzani is a research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria, where he leads the project “Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. His research interests include animal ethics, critical animal studies, literary animal studies, and biopolitics. His latest publications include the books Agamben and the Animal (2022) and Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination (2025), and the co-edited volumes Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020) and The Biopolitical Animal (2024).

Martin Huth is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. His work focuses on phenomenology and political phenomenology, with particular emphasis on ethics and applied ethics, including biomedical, animal, and veterinary ethics. Moreover, his research engages with disability studies, political theory, and theories of vulnerability, as well as the roles of empathy and imagination in moral and social contexts. He has served as Principal Investigator of the FWF-funded project The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism (2021–2025), in which he examines the societal conditions of the interrelations both between human and non-human animals and between normate and non-normate bodies.