Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The distinction between memory and imagination is among the first and most important applications of Hume's theory of impressions and ideas. Hume's accounts of causal inference, belief, and personal identity are couched in terms of it. Yet, like so many distinctions in Hume, attempts at careful explication lead to fascinating questions of analysis and interpretation. We will set out a number of these questions as we explore Hume's treatment of memory and imagination and we'll discuss some of the attempts to answer them in the recent literature. Hume introduces us to the faculties of memory and imagination very early in A Treatise of Human Nature. Our topic will bring us face to face with some of the most fundamental concerns of Hume's science of human nature.Although we will survey Hume's treatment of memory and imagination, it will not be possible to cover everything Hume has to say about these two aspects of the human mind. Specifically, we will have less to say about imagination than we will about memory. The main reason for this has to do with the very wide usage of the term “imagination” in Hume's texts. Often Hume uses the term “imagination” to encompass the entirety of the understanding. He says, for example, that the “understanding or imagination can draw inferences from past experience” (T 1.3.8.13). We will limit our treatment of the imagination to those passages where ... log in or subscribe to read full text