
Dr Dávid Bartha
Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2023 - June 2024
Home institution: Independent Researcher
Before coming to IASH in Edinburgh, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, working primarily on theories of representation in the Cartesian tradition. I obtained a PhD in Philosophy from Central European University in 2019 with a dissertation on Berkeley’s theological voluntarism. I published, among others, on the difference between Berkeley’s and Collier’s routes to immaterialism, and the metaphysical role the likeness principle plays in Berkeley’s philosophy. I have interest in diverse topics in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophical theology in various authors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century (especially, Foucher, Berkeley, Shepherd). My current project focuses on the views Scottish Enlightenment thinkers entertained about the nature and role of imagination.
Project Title: Imagination in the Scottish Enlightenment
My project explores the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers’ underappreciated theories of imagination. Beyond its place within our cognitive architecture, the project investigates their views concerning the various functions imagination fulfils in our psychological, embodied and social lives. Accordingly, it promises to shed light on the diversity and originality of Scottish Enlightenment. Although Thomas Reid (1710–1796) is at the centre of the project both theoretically and chronologically, Andrew Baxter (1686/1687–1750), David Hume (1711–1776), Adam Smith (c. 1723–1790), Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), Lady Mary Shepherd (1777–1847), Thomas Brown (1778–1820), and Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) are equally important sources of the investigation. One of the main research questions concerns the faculty psychology Reid put forward in place of the early modern conception he famously rejected. Along the way, I discuss the way Reid, his predecessors, as well as his critics and followers, drew the boundaries of imagination within our cognitive architecture, as well as the contrasting stances these authors took on the epistemic value of imagination. Another set of research questions relates to the bodily and social aspects of imagination. For instance, I seek to clarify how, as these authors believed, imagination plays a role in transmitting and reinforcing views, including prejudices, through often subconscious or even purely bodily mechanisms. But, as I also aim to explain, some Scottish Enlightenment philosophers emphasised the more positive role imagination plays in grasping and empathising with others’ mental states.