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Memory technologies are cultural artifacts that scaffold, transform, and are interwoven with human biological memory systems. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and integrative survey of their philosophical dimensions, including their metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dimensions, drawing together debates across the humanities, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. Metaphysical dimensions of memory technologies include their function, the nature of their informational properties, ways of classifying them, and their ontological status. Epistemological dimensions include the truth-conduciveness (...) of external memory, the conditions under which external memory counts as knowledge, and the metacognitive monitoring of external memory processes. And lastly, ethical and normative dimensions include the desirability of the effects memory technologies have on biological memory, their effects on self and culture, and their moral status. Whilst the focus in the article is largely philosophical and conceptual, empirical issues such as the way we interact with memory technologies in various contexts are also discussed. We thus take a naturalistic approach in which philosophical and empirical concepts and approaches are seen as continuous. (shrink)

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the chapters making up the book, which are grouped into six sections: challenges and alternatives to the causal theory of memory; activity and passivity in remembering; the affective dimension of memory; memory in groups; memory failures: concepts and ethical implications; and the content and phenomenology of episodic and semantic memory.

In this paper we present a introduction to the volume on philosophy of memory.

Memory occupies a fundamental place in philosophy, playing a central role not only in the history of philosophy but also in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Yet the philosophy of memory has only recently emerged as an area of study and research in its own right. -/- The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory is an outstanding reference source on the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting area, and is (...) the first philosophical collection of its kind. The forty-eight chapters are written by an international team of contributors, and divided into nine parts: -/- The nature of memory The metaphysics of memory Memory, mind and meaning Memory and the self Memory and time The social dimension of memory The epistemology of memory Memory and morality History of philosophy of memory. -/- Within these sections, central topics and problems are examined, including: truth, consciousness, imagination, emotion, self-knowledge, narrative, personal identity, time, collective and social memory, internalism and externalism, and the ethics of memory. The final part examines figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Augustine, Freud, Bergson, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, as well as perspectives on memory in Indian and Chinese philosophy. -/- Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind and psychology, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as psychology and anthropology. (shrink)

Although philosophers have explored memory since antiquity, recent years have seen the birth of philosophy of memory as a distinct field. This book—the first of its kind—charts emerging directions of research in the field. The book's nineteen newly-commissioned chapters develop novel theories of remembering and forgetting, analyze the phenomenology and content of memory, debate issues in the ethics and epistemology of remembering, and explore the relationship between memory and affectivity. Written by leading researchers in the (...) philosophy of memory, the chapters collectively present an exciting vision of the future of this dynamic area of research. (shrink)

This thesis is a comprehensive study of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of memory. It is divided into two sections. In the first part, consisting of the first three chapters, I seek to establish what memory and related concepts such as remembering, recollection, trained memory and “intellectual memory” are for Aquinas. In the second part, I explore how Aquinas conceives of memory as being operative in the cognitive and ethical life of the agent.

Bergson identifies multiple forms of memory throughout his work. In Matter and Memory, Bergson considers memory from the perspectives of both psychology and metaphysics, and he describes what we might refer to as contraction memory, perception memory, habit memory, recollection memory, and pure memory. Further, in subsequent works, Bergson discusses at least two additional forms of memory – namely, a memory of the present and a non-intellectual memory of the (...) will. However, it is often not clear how these different forms of memory relate to one another. With the aim of providing an overview of Bergson's philosophy of memory that can also serve as a point of entry to his philosophy as a whole, this article explores the different senses and forms of memory that Bergson describes, paying special attention to how they are distinct from one another and how they are unified. It is my intention to show that, although these various senses and forms of memory are different from one another , they are also continuous and unified insofar as they are equivalent to different tones of one's mental life and to different tensions of one duration. (shrink)

The idea that episodic memory is distinguished from semantic memory by the fact that it involves autonoetic consciousness, initially introduced by Tulving, has been influential not only in psychology but also in philosophy, where a variety of approaches to autonoesis and to its relationship to episodicity have been developed. This article provides a critical review of the available philosophical approaches. Distinguishing among representational, metacognitive, and epistemic accounts of autonoesis, it considers these in relation to objective and subjective (...) conceptions of episodicity and assesses them against immediacy and source criteria that any philosophical account of autonoesis should arguably aim to satisfy. (shrink)

The idea that episodic memory is a form of mental time travel has played an important role in the development of memory research in the last couple decades. Despite its growing importance in psychology, philosophers have only begun to develop an interest in philosophical questions pertaining to the relationship between memory and mental time travel. Thus, this paper proposes a more systematic discussion of the relationship between memory and mental time travel from the point of view (...) of philosophy. I start by discussing some of the motivations to take memory to be a form of mental time travel. I call the resulting view of memory the mental time travel view. I then proceed to consider important philosophical questions pertaining to memory and develop them in the context of the mental time travel view. I conclude by suggesting that the intersection of the philosophy of memory and research on mental time travel not only provides new perspectives to think about traditional philosophical questions, but also new questions that have not been explored before. (shrink)

The 12 chapters cover 6 questions: I. What is the relationship between memory and imagination? II. Do memory traces have content? III. What is the nature of mnemonic confabulation? IV. What is the function of episodic memory? V. Do non-human animals have episodic memory? VI. Does episodic memory give us knowledge of the past?

In this chapter, we examine the naturalist approach in the philosophy of memory through the lens of the simulation theory of memory. On the theory, episodic memory is a kind of constructive simulation performed by a functionally specialized neurocognitive system. Taking naturalism to be a kind of methodological stance characterized by a cluster of epistemic guidelines, we illustrate the roles these guidelines have played in the development of the theory. We show how scientific evidence has guided (...) both the selection of the research question and the initial elaboration of the theory. We demonstrate how such evidence has led the simulationist to reject a familiar, commonsense picture of memory. We also trace the recent radicalization of the theory, highlighting the simulationist's continual reflection on their concepts and assumptions. In the spirit of such reflection, we end by outlining some outstanding challenges for the theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that the biochemistry of memory consolidation provides valuable model systems for exploring the multiple realization of psychological states.

Although episodic memory is a widely studied form of memory both in philosophy and psychology, it still raises many burning questions regarding its definition and even its acceptance. Over the last two decades, cross-disciplinary discussions between these two fields have increased as they tackle shared concerns, such as the phenomenology of recollection, and therefore allow for fruitful interaction. This editorial introduction aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of the main existing conceptions and issues on the (...) topic. After delineating Tulving’s chief theoretical import and multifaceted legacy, it goes on to chart the different attempts to capture the episodicity feature of memory according to three categories: a first approach aims to show the cognitive abilities required for a subject to episodically remember; the second defines episodicity as a stage-specific feature; the last explains episodicity in terms of the epistemological properties of episodic memory. This state of the art thereby sets the stage for the contributions of the present volume, which will be introduced in conclusion. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise (...) urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

In this article, apart from a brief review of the relationship between mythos and logos, the author, who has based his study on the Freudian category of the social unconscious and Durkheim’s category of social consciousness, presents the characteristics of three modes of social memory: unconscious memory, interconscious memory and conscious memory. Based on Gilbert Durand’s mytho-analytical tool, the structure of the triad of memory: THE UNCONCIOUS – AWAITING – THE CONSCIOUS is shown as the (...) memory of the Father, Son and Mother. The mythological aspect of elapsing, past, reminiscence, living memory and anticipation is captured on the examples taken from Postmodern (the global society), Modern and even Pre-Modern). In this way, the author concludes that the contemporary transformation of memory into hallucinations means the beginning of anticipation for the End of History. (shrink)

_The Philosophy of Brentano_ has as its goal to explore the significance and impact of Franz Brentano’s thought, to promote a deepening of the ongoing renaissance of interest in Brentano, and to advance the project of understanding Brentano’s actual philosophical positions and correcting entrenched misunderstandings.

This paper proposes a novel account of the contents of memory. By drawing on insights from the philosophy of perception, I propose a hybrid account of the contents of memory designed to preserve important aspects of representationalist and relationalist views. The hybrid view I propose also contributes to two ongoing debates in philosophy of memory. First, I argue that, in opposition to eternalist views, the hybrid view offers a less metaphysically-charged solution to the co-temporality problem. (...) Second, I show how the hybrid view conceives of the relationship between episodic memory and other forms of episodic thinking. I conclude by considering some disanalogies between perception and memory and by replying to objections. I argue that, despite there being important differences between memory and perception, those differences do not harm my project. (shrink)

This volume, originating from the centennial Second International Conference Graz 1977-2017 on Franz Brentano's philosophy, collects eighteen essays written by nineteen distinguished specialists covering the main areas of Brentano's philosophy: his epistemology, ontology, ethics, and logic, and his contributions to psychology and philosophy of mind. Its goal is to explore the significance and impact of Brentano's thought, to promote a deepening of the ongoing renaissance of interest in Brentano, and to advance the project of understanding Brentano's actual (...) philosophical positions and correcting entrenched misunderstandings. (shrink)

Contrary to its self-proclamation, philosophy started not with wonder, but with time thrown out of joint. It started when the past has become a problem. Such was the historical situation facing Athens when Plato composed his Socratic dialogues. For the philosopher of fifth century BCE, both the immediate past and the past as the Homeric tradition handed down to the citizens had been turned into problematicity itself. In this essay, I will examine the use of philosophy as (...) class='Hi'>memory theatre in Plato's Republic. I shall do so by interpreting Book X of the Republic as Plato's “odyssey” and suggest that such Platonic odyssey amounts to an attempt to re-inherit the collapsed spatial and temporal order of the fallen Athenian maritime empire. In my reading, the Odysseus in the Myth of Er comes forth for Plato as the exemplary Soldier-Citizen-Philosopher who must steer between the Scylla of ossified political principles and the whirling nihilism of devalued historical values, personified by Charybdis. I shall further suggest that Plato’s memory theatre also constitutes a device of amnesia and forgetting. The post-Iliadic Odysseus must drink of forgetfulness from the river Lethe, so that the revenant soldier, Er, and those who inherited the broken historical present during and after the Peloponnesian War, would be enabled to remember in a particular way. Such remembrance, I shall conclude, may be what Plato means by philosophy, a memory theatre of psychic regulation and moral economy that sets itself decidedly apart from earlier tragic and comic catharsis. (shrink)

This book investigates central issues in the philosophy of memory. Does remembering require a causal process connecting the past representation to its subsequent recall and, if so, what is the nature of the causal process? Of what kind are the primary intentional objects of memory states? How do we know that our memory experiences portray things the way they happened in the past? Given that our memory is not only a passive device for reproducing thoughts (...) but also an active device for processing stored thoughts, when are thoughts sufficiently similar to be memory-related? The Metaphysics of Memory defends a version of the causal theory of memory, argues for direct realism about memory, proposes an externalist response to skepticism about memory knowledge, and develops a contextualist account of the factivity constraint on memory. (shrink)

While Qian Mu intentionally avoided systematic philosophical arguments, his references to memory, language, and emotions, as expressed in a book he wrote in 1948, were suggestive of new interpretations of traditional Chinese, and especially Confucian, ideas such as human autonomy, mind, human nature, morality, immortality, and spirituality. The foremost contribution of Qian’s humanist synthesis rests in its articulation of the idea of the person. Across the context of memory, language, and emotions, the tiyong dynamics of mind and human (...) nature recreate, in modern terms, the traditional Chinese concept of the person who is individually unique and simultaneously interrelated. Avoiding the extreme polarities of individualism and collectivism, he stresses rather their coexistence. His synthesis explains to the Chinese people something about who they are, the meaning in life in the framework of their culture, and how their (revitalized) way of life is at its best in the most important area, that of human relations. (shrink)

Contrary to its self-proclamation, philosophy started not with wonder, but with time thrown out of joint. It started when the past has become a problem. Such was the historical situation facing Athens when Plato composed his Socratic dialogues. For the philosopher of fifth century BCE, both the immediate past and the past as the Homeric tradition handed down to the citizens had been turned into problematicity itself. In this essay, I will examine the use of philosophy as (...) class='Hi'>memory theatre in Plato's Republic. I shall do so by interpreting Book X of the Republic as Plato's “odyssey” and suggest that such Platonic odyssey amounts to an attempt to re-inherit the collapsed spatial and temporal order of the fallen Athenian maritime empire. In my reading, the Odysseus in the Myth of Er comes forth for Plato as the exemplary Soldier-Citizen-Philosopher who must steer between the Scylla of ossified political principles and the whirling nihilism of devalued historical values, personified by Charybdis. I shall further suggest that Plato’s memory theatre also constitutes a device of amnesia and forgetting. The post-Iliadic Odysseus must drink of forgetfulness from the river Lethe, so that the revenant soldier, Er, and those who inherited the broken historical present during and after the Peloponnesian War, would be enabled to remember in a particular way. Such remembrance, I shall conclude, may be what Plato means by philosophy, a memory theatre of psychic regulation and moral economy that sets itself decidedly apart from earlier tragic and comic catharsis. (shrink)

Despite an explosion of studies on memory in historical and cultural studies, there is relatively little in moral philosophy on this subject. In this book, Jeffrey Blustein provides a systematic and philosophically rigorous account of a morality of memory. Drawing on a broad range of philosophical and humanistic literatures, he offers a novel examination of memory and our relations to people and events from our past, the ways in which memory is preserved and transmitted, and (...) the moral responsibilities associated with it. Blustein treats topics of responsibility for one's own past; historical injustice and the role of memory in doing justice to the past; the relationship of collective memory to history and identity; collective and individual obligations to remember those who have died, including those who are dear to us; and the moral significance of bearing witness. (shrink)

In a book that asks, 'Is there an ethics of memory?' Avishai Margalit addresses a separate, perhaps more pressing, set of concerns.

The Neuroethics of Memory is a thematically integrated analysis and discussion of neuroethical questions about memory capacity and content, as well as interventions to alter it. These include: how does memory function enable agency, and how does memory dysfunction disable it? To what extent is identity based on our capacity to accurately recall the past? Could a person who becomes aware during surgery be harmed if they have no memory of the experience? How do we (...) weigh the benefits and risks of brain implants designed to enhance, weaken or erase memory? Can a person be responsible for an action if they do not recall it? Would a victim of an assault have an obligation to retain a memory of this act, or the right to erase it? This book uses a framework informed by neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy combined with actual and hypothetical cases to examine these and related questions. (shrink)

Cultures of Memory in South Asia reconfigures European representations of India as a paradigmatic extension of a classical reading, which posits the relation between text and context in a determined way. It explores the South Asian cultural response to European "textual" inheritances. The main argument of this work is that the reflective and generative nodes of Indian cultural formations are located in the configurations of memory, the body and idiom (verbal and visual), where the body or the body (...) complex becomes the performative effect and medium of articulated memories. This work advances its arguments by engaging with mnemocultures-cultures of memory-that survive and proliferate in speech and gesture. Drawing on Sanskrit and Telugu reflective sources, this work emphasizes the need to engage with cultural memory and the compositional modes of Indian reflective traditions. This important and original work focuses on the ruptured and stigmatized resources of heterogeneous Indian traditions and calls for critical humanities that move beyond the colonially configured received traditions. Cultures of Memory suggests the possibilities of transcultural critical humanities research and teaching initiatives from the Indian context in today's academy. (shrink)

This is a response to three critical discussions of my book Memory: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press 2010): Marya Schechtman, “Memory and Identity”, Fred Adams, “Husker Du?”, and Sanford Goldberg “The Metasemantics of Memory”.

During the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophers of memory opposed the postulation of memory traces based on the claim that a satisfactory account of remembering need not include references to causal processes involved in recollection. However, in 1966, an influential paper by Martin and Deutscher showed that causal claims are indeed necessary for a proper account of remembering. This, however, did not settle the issue, as in 1977 Malcolm argued that even if one were to (...) buy Martin and Deutscher’s argument for causal claims, we still don’t need to postulate the existence of memory traces. This paper reconstructs the dialectic between realists and anti-realists about memory traces, suggesting that ultimately realists’ arguments amount to inferences to the best explanation. I then argue that Malcolm’s anti-realist strategy consists in the suggestion that causal explanations that do not invoke memory traces are at least as good as those that do. But then, Malcolm, I argue that there are a large number of memory phenomena for which explanations that do not postulate the existence of memory traces are definitively worse than explanations that do postulate them. Next, I offer a causal model based on an interventionist framework to illustrate when memory traces can help to explain memory phenomena and proceed to substantiate the model with details coming from extant findings in the neuroscience of memory. (shrink)

The article argues that the oral history of philosophy (OHP) will not produce reliable results unless it develops effective methods of counteracting cognitive biases related to human memory. So far, this problem has not even been raised. I highlighted the main cognitive memory biases that affect the validity of the UIF: choice-supportive bias, hindsight bias, fundamental attribution error. Describing the nature of their detrimental effects on the interview, I suggested ways to counteract it: (1) multi-level verification of (...) all actual data; (2) checking of the interview's previous judgment; (3) mandatory data validation for the potential impact of nostalgia; (4) co-creation interviewing; (5) a sequence of questions that will problematize the possible impact of bias during the interview itself. As OHF is still a theoretically unspecified discipline, I have proposed a concept that includes (a) its definition, (b) its place among other historical and philosophical disciplines, (c) its main genres and their specificities; (d) the irreplaceability of its data for the history of philosophy as a science (the ability to engage the interviewer in an active non-self-reflection situation). Interviewer answers often cannot be obtained from traditional sources (articles, books, drafts, letters, margins, etc. ). In the end, I outlined five main arguments in favor of the broad involvement of students of the philosophical faculties in organizing and conducting interviews within the OHF. (shrink)

A critical appraisal of husserl's lectures on internal time-Consciousness and passive synthesis (touching the theme of memory) is followed by an appreciation of merleau-Ponty's "problem of passivity". I argue that husserl's descriptions of memory processes embody prejudices stemming from the 'objective time' he claims to have bracketed out and that his phenomenological method is itself a phenomenon of the mathematical imagination. The latter pursues inherited ideals of clarity, Evidence, Immanence and presence which distort all mnemonic phenomena. Merleau-Ponty eschews (...) the representational thought, Objective-Linear time, Evidence and immanence of husserlian epistemology. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of ambiguity responds with greater suppleness and subtlety to the most ambiguous of phenomena--Memory. (shrink)

Memory trace was originally a philosophical term used to explain the phenomenon of remembering. Once debated by Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium, the notion seems more recently to have become the exclusive province of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Nonetheless, this modern appropriation should not deter philosophers from thinking carefully about the nature of memory traces. On the contrary, scientific research on the nature of memory traces can rekindle philosopher's interest on this notion. With that general aim (...) in mind, the present paper has three specific goals. First, it attempts to chart the most relevant philosophical views on the nature of memory traces from both a thematic and historical perspective. Second, it reviews critical findings in the psychology and the neuroscience of memory traces. Finally, it explains how such results lend support to or discredit specific philosophical positions on the nature of memory traces. This paper also touches upon the issues raised by recent empirical research that theories of memory traces need to accommodate in order to succeed. (shrink)

The main objectives of this paper are to analyze the relation between memory and oblivion and their exterior forms to the level of physical and cultural space. The notion of memory places (defined as accumulations of signs of identity and their materializations) is presented in its two manifestations: as memory landmarks (connection points to the collective past) and as memory signs. The distinction is based on the power of memory to remind us who we are, (...) but also what we forgot about ourselves. We divided the paper in several parts. (shrink)

The most salient aspect of memory is its role in preserving previously acquired information so as to make it available for further activities. Anna realizes that something is amiss in a book on Roman history because she learned and remembers that Caesar was murdered. Max turned up at the party and distinctively remembers where he was seated, so he easily gets his hands on his lost cell phone. The fact that information is not gained anew distinguishes memory from (...) perception. The fact that information is preserved distinguishes memory from imagination. But how do acquisition and retrieval of information contribute to the phenomenology of memory?The exclusive aim of this chapter is to sketch a map of the phenomenology of memory. It is structured as follows. In section 1, I introduce the contrast between content (what is remembered) and psychological attitude (remembering). This distinction will be helpful in disentangling issues in the phenomenology of memory. Section 2 is devoted to the contribution of memory content to phenomenology, section 3 to the contribution of the attitude of remembering. (shrink)

Although Descartes’s ideas regarding consciousness and memory have been studied extensively, few attempts have been made to address their systemic relations. In order to redress this deficiency, I argue in favor of three interrelated theses. The first is that intellectual memory has a crucial role to play in Descartes’s concept of consciousness, especially when it comes to explaining higher forms of consciousness. Second, the connection between memory and consciousness has been obscured by the fact that intellectual (...) class='Hi'>memory, taken as a subject in its own right, was relatively neglected in Descartes’s philosophy: By and large, his views on the matter remained within the limits of late scholastic Scotism. Third, what makes the question of intellectual memory so fascinating in Descartes is not some ground-breaking insight into its nature; rather, it is his gradual recognition of the role that intellectual memory plays in the constitution of higher forms of consciousness. With these arguments, and relying on Descartes’s 1648 correspondence with Antoine Arnauld, where he progressed beyond the substance-based approach to the self, I try to show that he deserves to be credited with a more prominent status in the history of the self and personhood than has previously been the case. (shrink)

Human beings tend to forget, especially when they suffer; they hope to overcome the pain of trauma to live a peaceful and happy life. The futurist attitude that can be articulated as ‘Move towards...