ABSTRACT
A gulf seems to separate Hume's and Kant's treatment of imagination. But the transition between them reveals more than simply a shift from Hume's extreme empiricist perspective, on the one hand, to Kant's transcendental idealism, on the other. When viewed within the wider context of Kant's reply to Hume, the divergent path on which the former redefines imagination mirrors the methodological breakthrough to answer the latter's skeptical law of causality. Though for Kant imagination bears an important affinity to our senses, for Hume imagination remains parasitical upon sense impressions. The attempt to trace the transition from Hume's treatment of imagination to Kant's sheds considerable light on the relation between these two thinkers and the key divergence of their respective methodologies. There is a further way in which methodological role of imagination appears in the third Critique in the context of Kant's attempt to mediate between the divisions of theoretical and practical philosophy.
