From Mechanism to Associationism. The Development of Imagination and Idea in some Conceptions from Hobbes to Hume

Abstract

The article explains the nature of the power of imagination conceived from the perspective of the evolution of the notion in the 17th and 18th century British empiricism. Taking as a starting point Hobbes’ materialistic and mechanistic philosophical system we reconstruct the change of thought in Locke’s, Berkley’s and finally in Hume’s analyses. At the same time we observe the increase of those philosophers’ interest in associational relations and change in perceiving the role these relations played in the process of cognition as well as in the acts of imagination, anticipation or reasoning.