Hume on the Imagination

  • Fabian Dorsch University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Keywords: Fiction, Belief, Perception, Memory, Modal Epistemology, Empiricism, Disjunctivism

Abstract

This article overviews Hume’s thoughts on the nature and the role of imagining, with an almost exclusive focus on the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature. Over the course of this text, Hume draws and discusses three important distinctions among our conscious mental episodes (or what he calls ‘perceptions’): (i) between impressions (including perceptual experiences) and ideas (including recollections, imaginings and occurrent beliefs); (ii) between ideas of the memory and ideas of the imagination; and (iii), among the ideas of the imagination, between ideas of the judgement (i.e. occurrent beliefs) and ideas of the fancy (i.e. imaginings). I discuss each distinction in turn, also in connection to contemporary views on imagining. In addition, I briefly consider Hume’s views on the imagination as a faculty aimed at the production of ideas, as well as on the role that imagining plays in the wider context of our mental lives, notably in the acquisition of modal knowledge and in the comprehension of stories and opinions that we take to be false or fictional.

Author Biography

Fabian Dorsch, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Fabian Dorsch is SNF Research Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. PhD in Philosophy at the
University College London. His main interests are the philosophy of mind, epistemology, meta–ethics,
metaphysics and aesthetics. He is co–editor, together with Fiona Macpherson, of the books: Perceptual
Imagination and Perceptual Memory (Oxford/NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2018) and Phenomenal
Presence (Oxford/NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2018); and author of Die Natur der Farben (Berlín: De
Gruyter, 2009) and The Unity of Imagining (Berlín: De Gruyter, 2012).

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Published
2018-12-31
How to Cite
[1]
Dorsch, F. 2018. Hume on the Imagination. Disputatio. 7, 8 (Dec. 2018), a008. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2551858.
Section
Articles and Essays