Historical treatments of imagination in the western tradition

This chapter reconstructs prevalent treatments of the imagination within the Western tradition, with a special focus on the treatments offered by Aristotle, Hobbes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. To start, the chapter differentiates six functions attributed to the imagination. This differentiation provides a framework with which to track the philosophical understanding of this capacity through the centuries. The chapter then focuses on one of imagination’s many functions, namely, to serve as a mediatory capacity between lower, perception-related faculties and higher, thought-related faculties. The exploration reveals that, for some philosophers, this function of the imagination was considered the source of human creativity.