This article engages the considerations of imagination in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur to argue for a moral dimension of the imagination and its objects. Imaginary objects are taken to be mental representations in images and narratives of people or courses of action that are not real in the sense that they are not actual, or have not yet happened. Three claims are made in the article. First, by drawing on the category of possibility, a conceptual distinction is established between imagination and (...) fantasy, (1) I claim that imagination has a moral dimension because it is engaged in considering real-life possibilities. Second, (2) drawing on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, it is argued that mental representations of selfhood in imagination have a moral dimension because they essentially allow people to understand the development of agency in human selfhood by means of representations of would-be selves and narrative figurations of the self. Third, (3) mental representations of human selves have a moral dimension because they form important points of reference for moral orientations in the field of human praxis (moral pointers). (shrink)

My aim is to look into the representational aspect of ideas, exploring not only to what Hume refers as adequate ideas, but also these cases where for a number of reasons an idea does not reach that standard. It has been suggested that the latter are fictions, but an in-depth examination of Hume texts reveals that there are several types of imperfections, such as incompleteness or imprecision that prevent an idea from being adequate. This leads to an analysis of the (...) status of supposed or pretended ideas, and the possibility of there being terms with no ideas annexed to them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) describes a philosophical discussion on the validity of the argument from design. What Hume investigates, however, is not the rational grounds of religion, but human nature and its attraction to the idea of design. I argue that the key to understanding Hume’s Dialogues is his conception of the imagination as described in the Treatise. Hume characterizes the human imagination or mind as self-indulgent, with a strong drive to unite perceptions in relations of resemblance, (...) contiguity or causality, often adding fictional constructions to create an easy transition between ideas. Natural religion is a prime example, as the whole universe is united in orderly means-to-ends relations and provided with a familiar cause: something resembling the human mind. This reading of the Dialogues, however, does not warrant the conclusion that Hume provides a reductionist natural explanation of natural religion. Knowing human nature helps to understand religion’s attraction and the attraction of religion helps to understand humans, because it is paradigmatic of who we are. To connect perceptions, construct wholes and create meaning out of chaos is an essential feature of human nature, and a source of great pleasure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article recovers the discussion of the relationship between religion, human nature and happiness in the Scottish Enlightenment physician John Gregory’s (1724–1773) A Comparative View of Human Nature (1765). Through examining Gregory’s best-selling but understudied text, this article explores how the Aberdeen Enlightenment’s own branch of the wider Scottish ‘science of human nature’, centred at the famous Aberdeen Philosophical Society, was as deeply concerned with the study of religion as it was the philosophy of mind. Gregory examined how the (...) purported cultural spread of dogmatic scepticism, associated by the Aberdonians with David Hume, threatened individual happiness and social tranquillity by removing the crutch of religious belief upon which the multitude (though not the philosopher) depended. In doing so, it suggests that the contribution made by physicians to the Scottish Enlightenment’s engagement with religion has been unjustly ignored. (shrink)

This essay examines Hume’s treatment of money in light of his view of the imagination. It begins with his claim that money is distinct from wealth, the latter arising, according to vulgar reasoning, from the power of acquisition that it represents, or, understood philosophically, from the labor that produces it. The salient features that Hume identifies with the imagination are then put forth, namely its power to combine ideas creatively and the principle of easy transition that characterizes its movement among (...) them. Two issues that these features explain are then discussed: first, why people take value to lie in the material of which money is made, and, second, why they assign value to what they take money to represent, namely, wealth. In both cases, the imagination creates a new relation, an illusion or fiction, that cannot be traced directly to experience. In the case of money, the faculty conjoins what is intangible (the power of acquisition) with the physical qualities of specie; in the case of property it produces a causal relation that connects persons with objects to constitute stable possession that constitutes ownership. Hume also appeals to the imagination to explain the rules of property that subsequently develop (present possession, occupation, prescription, and transference). The essay concludes by emphasizing that being based on the imagination is not in itself indicative of any instability in either money or property and the practices they enshrine, a feature they share with other phenomena (such as the self and continued existence) that Hume also traces to the same faculty. (shrink)

Hume’s claim that we project necessity onto objects we take to be causally related has been influential in contemporary discussions of modality, inspiring deflationary accounts of our modal commitments. Hume is commonly understood as holding that modal projection explains our judging that an effect must follow its cause. This misunderstands the role of projection in Hume’s discussions of causation and causal judgement. Projection is a diagnosis of a distinctively philosophical confusion: the commitment to mind-independent necessary connections. In arguing for this, (...) I provide an account of the psychological process that, in Hume’s view, underlies projection. This account resolves problems with Hume’s projectivism identified by his commentators. (shrink)

In the “Appendix” to the Treatise, Hume claims that he has discovered a “very considerable” mistake in his earlier discussion of the self. Hume's expression of the problem is notoriously opaque, leading to a vast scholarly debate as to exactly what problem he identified in his earlier account of the self. I propose a new solution to this interpretive puzzle. I argue that a tension generated by Hume's conceptual skepticism about real “principles of union” and his account of fictions of (...) the imagination is the defect identified in the “Appendix.”. (shrink)