ABSTRACT
Although the faculty of imagination is central to the philosophical psychology of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), pinpointing his views on its nature as a cognitive power is difficult. A major obstacle is the equivocity of the very term “imagination” (al-takhayyul), which serves both as an umbrella term covering all of the faculties known as the “internal senses” in medieval philosophy and as the proper name for one of those internal senses. I trace the specific operations that Averroes assigns to the imagination in his various works in an attempt to differentiate its distinctive function from those of the other internal senses. While the most pervasive characterization of Averroist imagination is its identification as the power by which we are able to perceive sensibles in their absence, unresolved ambiguities still remain in his account.
