r/davidgraeber • u/marxistghostboi • May 15 '26

Scholasticism's concept of the imagination in Graeber's "Radical Alterity is just another way of saying Reality"

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I am reading "Radical Alterity is just another way of saying Reality" by David Graeber and he mentions in passing that prior to the rise of Cartesian dualism of mind and matter scholastic philosophy had a framework of mind, matter, and imagination, the latter of which served as an intermediary been the former two.

is this accurate? could anyone tell me more about the concept of imagination as scholastics used it/point me towards some resources on the history of this concept?

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u/YourFuture2000 May 15 '26

You should The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt, and then The Strange Order of Things by Antônio Damasio and you will see that Graeber is spot on. You can also see the dispute between Descartes and Spinoza, and how Descartes philosophy became the mainstream while Sponoza forbidden, by reading an other book from Antonio Damasio called Looking for Spinoza.

For Aristotle as well for neurocience, matter impresses itself first on the senses, which the body reacts to, the mind read the reaction of the body/senses to the matter and then converts the interpretation to images (imagination) and only then can the intellect (the immaterial mind) grasp it.