Philosophy

Dr. Colin Chamberlain (Temple University) will give a talk to the UF Philosophy Department on March 25. Dr. Chamberlain works on topics in early modern philosophy, focusing especially on Descartes’s and Malebranche’s accounts of embodiment. See below for the talk title and abstract. The talk will take place in the department library, and will also be broadcast on Zoom. (Zoom Link)

Malebranche on the Imagination

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that many aspects of our minds are designed to keep us alive. The senses, imagination, and passion aim at survival or the good of the body, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Commentators have largely focused on Malebranche’s account of the way the senses contribute to this goal—for example, by representing the world in body-relative and evaluative ways. The imagination and passions, in contrast, have received less attention. My project in this paper is to reconstruct Malebranche’s account of the imagination’s contributions to self-preservation. I argue that the imagination’s contributions are threefold. First, the imagination allows us to adapt to different circumstances through a process of associative learning and generalization. Second, it allows us to form reliable expectations about what the future holds for us, e.g. that if we touch the fire, it will hurt. Third, the imagination underwrites our capacity for sympathy, which is a prerequisite for surviving in the distinctively social world we inhabit.