Imagination et passions chez Descartes et Hobbes

The imagination has a crucial yet elusive role in both Descartes’s and Hobbes’s theories of passions. In spite of his reduction of imagination to the body, Descartes accounts for the affectivity of the soul as a complex result of the intrinsic intertwinement between thinking and imagination. Hobbes, on the other hand, refutes all dualism between corporeal passions and the willing soul, yet he describes the passions of the mind as stemming from a peculiarly mental imagination of the future. This contribution investigates the developments of such an “imaginative thinking” within Descartes’s and Hobbes’s moral anthropologies.