Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Hume’s Imagination by Tito MAGRI Don Garrett MAGRI, Tito. Hume’s Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. xiii + 494 pp. Cloth, $115.00In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume defines “the imagination” in an inclusive sense as “the faculty, by which we form our fainter ideas”—that is, those that are not memories. In the narrower sense, it is “the same faculty, excluding only our demonstrative and probable reasonings.” Book 1 of the Treatise is largely a work about the imagination in the inclusive sense. Indeed, by Magri’s count, book 1 contains more occurrences of the term imagination/imagine and its variants than of any other philosophical term with the exceptions of impression and idea. Yet until the late 1990s, it was surprisingly rare to find commentators treating the Humean imagination as a focus of attention in its own right, and the complete range of its many roles and operations has largely remained uncatalogued until now. With twelve highly detailed chapters distinguishing no fewer than twenty different “works of the imagination” governed by eighteen different “principles,” Hume’s Imagination is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the faculty to date. Indeed, its only limitations are its two announced ones. First, it does not discuss the imagination in Hume’s subsequent An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (where its operations receive much less attention) or other writings. Second, it does not discuss the extensive roles played by the imagination in Treatise, book 2 (“Of the Passions”) and book 3 (“Of Morals”)—although readers may hope that a sequel will take up those roles. The wide array of roles and operations that Hume attributes to the inclusive imagination, even in Treatise, book 1 alone, naturally raises the question of how much real unity it has as a psychological natural kind. Magri’s original and provocative answer to this question is that the various operations of Hume’s imagination are unified by their filling in various “cognitive gaps” between the representational contents of the mind’s sensations and memories, on the one hand, and the full range of its cognitive contents and capacities, on the other. Rather than appealing to the kind of purely intellectual ideas posited by Descartes and other so-called rationalists who drew a strong distinction between the intellect and the imagination, however, Hume traces our further abilities to the inferences and mental transitions that the imagination produces utilizing only broadly imagistic ideas. In support of this answer, the book is divided into five parts. Part I, chapter 1 explains the central notion of a “cognitive gap” in terms of a “dualism of representation and inference.” For Magri, “representation” applies only to sensation and memory (although he grants that [End Page 156] “presentation” might be the better term in the case of sensation), as governed by Hume’s self-described first principle: “our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.” This principle is the topic of chapter 2. “Inference” (or, more broadly, “transitions”) applies only to the imagination, which generates new “nonrepresentational” cognitive content in accordance with what Hume calls his second principle: “the liberty of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas.” This principle is the topic of chapter 3. To say, as Magri does, that the only “representational” ideas for Hume are those of memory sounds highly paradoxical, but the intended (nonparadoxical) meaning becomes clear enough on careful reading. Part 2 of the book takes up the role of the imagination in generating specifically conceptual modes of thought. In chapter 4, Magri explains the mind’s capacity for generality in thought through the operation of “abstract ideas” and its capacity to distinguish different aspects of an object through the operation of “distinctions of reason.” In chapter 5, he examines the generation of distinctively modal content through the capacity of the imagination to conceive the same object as having different qualities or being placed in different circumstances. Part 3 turns to the crucial topic of the imagination’s generation of cognition of a world of “realities” beyond sensation and memory through the production of “causal ideas.” Chapter 6...