Dr Dávid Bartha: "The Role of Imagination in Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy"

The Role of Imagination in Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy

Imagination is rarely given a positive role in the narratives of early modern enlightenment, an intellectual movement often summarized in the exhortation to (dare to) think for yourself. On this influential understanding, being ‘enlightened’ not only requires that one reason in an impartial manner on the basis of appropriate evidence. But it also involves that one rids oneself of any uncritical reliance on traditional epistemic authorities and other social sources of beliefs. Imagination, like the closely related faculty of passions, fits into this picture rather uneasily as it is suspect on both counts. It is not a rational faculty as it is unlimited by any objective evidence or logic. But imagination also makes us more susceptible to social influences, allowing us to take over, often in a subconscious way, others’ affective as well as cognitive states. While of course there is more than a grain of truth to this narrative, and indeed many Enlightenment authors, including Scottish ones, pointed out the epistemic pitfalls of using our imagination, this negative strand in their thinking should not be seen as exhaustive concerning their views about imagination and its role in epistemology and our psychological and social lives more generally. In this talk, I give an explorative overview of the themes of my research project on the role imagination plays in Scottish enlightenment philosophy. I introduce various concepts of imagination from all periods of Scottish enlightenment proposed by authors such as Andrew Baxter, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart and Mary Shepherd. This analysis promises to prove that imagination plays a much more positive role in the thought of these enlightenment authors than generally assumed. But it also reveals the diversity of their evaluations of the nature and epistemic status of imagination, as well as the different functions, according to these authors, imagination plays in our psychological, embodied and social lives.