Ontological and epistemological place of imagination in Spinoza's philosophy

The distinction between imagination's representations about reality and reality itself is the main starting point of this study. This study aims to understand the ontological ground of imagination in Spinoza's philosophy and to show what kind of representations it causes in human mind. It focuses on the relation that human beings establish with reality through imagination. It questions the fact of relating imagination to the nature of human body and mind which are open to external influences. At this point, the study makes the interaction itself and the meaning of external existence problematic. Spinoza relates imagination to fragmentary ideas that arise in the mind as a result of the interaction of the human body with other objects. In the face of the very complex structure of reality in which everything interacts with other things, the imagination can acquire only a very limited knowledge. This knowledge is neither of the essences of things nor of their causes. According to Spinoza, the mind, through imagination, only becomes aware of the effects of things on the body and creates representations of these effects called images. It also records these images via memory. The imagination can retrieve these images over and over. The operations of imagination on these images and the unreal representations thereby created constitute one of the main topics of this thesis. This study also tries to reveal how imagination as a type of knowledge is positioned against reason and intellect and why it is seen as the source of falsehood in Spinoza's thought. It aims to make clear what kind of representations the human imagination leads to in relation to the perennial concepts of metaphysics such as Being, nothingness, God, space, thought, infinity, eternity, perfection, time, causality and necessity. It identifies the imagination as the source of operations such as producing fictitious representations, making assumptions, abstracting, comparing, negating, drawing analogies. As a result of these processes, it focuses on how abstract entities such as universals, unreal fictitious entities such as Chimaera and mind entities such as time, measure and number are produced in the mind. In this context, it handles the power and weakness of the imagination. Keywords: Being, Infinity, Eternity, Imagination, Intellect.