Fantasie e verità. Note sull’immaginazione in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola

In his De imaginatione, Gianfrancesco Pico della mirandola argues that men are not rational animals but animals slaves of their imaginations. under the im- pulse of these imaginations – he explains – they think and act. pico also writes that the imagination is the cause of false judgments and vain opinions, especially in philosophy. this idea seems a phisophical mistake because the imagination is considered the unique responsible for defects of wrong propositions, even if it is not evidently the faculty from which proceeds the emission of the judgment, that depends rather on reason and intel- lect. this paper attempts to investigate the association between imagination and false- hood, immediately before and immediately after the De imaginatione, to understand if the thesis by pico is really just a mistake. my research has shown that the idea that the imagination is a cause of falsehood is already present in medieval philosophy (explained by thomas and Augustine). however, medieval philosophers never confuse the activ- ity of imagination with the task of reason and intellect. in the renaissance, instead, something changes, because there is the linguistic habit to use the terms imaginationes, phantasiae and similar as synonyms of vain or unreliable opinion. so in my paper i argue that the study of De imaginatione can be useful to analyse the philosophical reasons of this change