Descartes's Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking [Book Review]

Review of Metaphysics 50 (2):424-425 (1996)
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Abstract

1996 marks the 400th anniversary of Descartes' birth, and it seems only appropriate that it should bring a reevaluation of Descartes' thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Dennis Sepper's new book on the role of the imagination offers such a rethinking, proposing that--contrary to popular rumor--Descartes' entire corpus was centrally concerned with the proper uses of imagination, a concern initially informed by medieval doctrines of the internal senses and imagination. Sepper argues that Descartes' earliest work, especially the Cogitatione Privatae, places enormous confidence in the power and scope of imagination, a confidence based on a view of the cosmos as a network of resemblances and analogous relations, providing an unproblematic fit between mind and world. The role of imagination here is not to construct objects wholesale, but to allow understanding through figures, figures that stand in analogical and symbolic relations to the objects of conception so that they can be grasped under a particular aspect. Sepper calls this a "biplanar" model of understanding, whereby an object present to cognition is imaginatively configured in another "plane," allowing us both to focus and shift attention.

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Amy Schmitter
University of Alberta

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