Imagination has always been recognised as an important faculty of the
human soul. As mediator between the senses and reason, it is rooted in
philosophical and psychological-medical theories of human sensation and
cognition. Linked to these theories was the use of the imagination in
rhetoric and the arts: images had not only an epistemological role in
transmitting information from the outside world to the mind's inner eye,
but could also be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. In
this tradition, with Cicero and Quintilian as its auctoritates, images
were used to arouse and manipulate the emotions. Both traditions had to
be revalued in the seventeenth century with the advent of a mechanist,
Cartesian picture of human cognition and the physical world. In spite of
their usual suspicion of imagination, which was commonly associated with
illusions, dreams and fiction, seventeenth-century philosophers realised
that the imagination also had its place in mathematical, scientific and
philosophical thinking. This volume, number XII in the series Groningen
Studies in Cultural Change, offers the papers presented at a workshop on
imagination, organised by the editors in September 2002. It covers both
the philosophical-psychological as well as the humanist-rhetorical
traditions, discussing key figures such as Kilwardby, Lorenzo Valla,
Leon Battista Alberti, Agricola, Gianfrancesco Pico, Erasmus,
Paracelsus, Kepler, Bacon, Suarez, Descartes and Spinoza, but also
treating hitherto neglected texts and writers such as Nicholas of
Amsterdam and Jean Lemaire de Belges. By focusing on the ever-shifting
ideas of the imagination as a philosophical and rhetorical tool, this
volume not only deepens our understanding of its central theme but also
sheds new light on the thought and writings of these and other authors.
