The status of imagination in Hume's theory of passions

Abstract

A more attentive reading of the pages that compose books II and III of the Treatise of human nature disclose innumerable instinctive processes of the imagination operating freely in the production of good part of our passions. They could be reduced to the imaginative propensity of transfigure, in some way, the experience. It ́s what takes place, for example, when we anticipate regularities observed between the phenomena and conceive a bigger regularity that the evidenced in past observations. This betrayal of the experience for the imagination will reflect in the production of some affections. In the truth, there would not be only the possibility of the conjugation of the imaginative processes with the production of intense passions, but also of linking of these ones with the production of the calm passions, although the humean ́s theory of the passions seem, for times, to privilege “the negative” aspect of the imagination, front to the “positive” sanctioned by the understanding.