ABSTRACT
While the ostensible topic of the chapter is visual spatiality, its underlying focus is imagination, and in particular how a faculty that previous to Berkeley was regarded as limited to fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, and arbitrary associations like phobias first acquired the status of a genuine cognitive faculty, fully worthy of being set alongside the understanding. It has to do with the fact that representation of physical objects requires the ability to see, touch, hear, smell, and otherwise sensibly apprehend one and the same spatial object, and so presupposes a consciousness in which the sensory fields of the various external senses are so highly integrated that they function as a single, unified external sense. Berkeley’s analysis of visual spatiality led him to conclude that such consciousness is possible only in and through the association in imagination of intrinsically non-spatial visual and other sensations with properly spatial tactual sensations. It thus cleared the way for Hume and Kant to enrich and develop Berkeley’s conception to the point where the imagination could be accorded a central place in their comprehensive psychologistic treatments of cognitive understanding. Subjects discussed include the Molyneux problem, visuo-tactual interface, echolocation, human and animal bodily spatiality, blindsight, emotions, faces, and language.
