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.

Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history (...) of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self. (shrink)

The Simulation Theory of Memory states that to remember an episode is to simulate it in the imagination (Michaelian, 2016a, b), making memory thus reducible to the act of imagining. This paper examines Simulation Theory’s resources to account for our ability to distinguish episodic memory from free imagination. The theory suggests that we can reliably do so because of the distinctive phenomenology episodic memory comes with (i.e., a feeling of remembering), which other episodic imaginings lack. I will raise two objections (...) to how the feeling of remembering is engineered in the theory, followed by an exhaustive exploration of the theory’s resources to ground the mechanism underlying the elicitation of such feeling. I will conclude that the Simulation Theory cannot simultaneously defend the simulational character of episodic memory and ground our ability to discriminate between memories and imaginings. (shrink)

Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present (re-listening to music, re- reading novels) can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history. The kinds of works that prompt such recollection, I call ‘still lives’ - they are limited wholes whose formal properties are (...) stable over time. In the first part of the paper, I spell out a way of making sense of the peculiar power that certain artworks have to occasion such recollection – it is, as I explain, a power or ductus that derives from the form of the artwork, though possession of such a power is not limited to art. I then detail three dimensions along which episodic recollection and phasic recollection as occasioned by re-encountering ‘still lives’ differ: metaphysical, phenomenological, and descriptive. In the second half, I explore a challenge for my account of phasic recollection, which in turn helps make more vivid my proposal as well as the spectral analogy at the heart of it: Just as one can see regions behind one by looking in the direction of a mirror located in the same space in which one is, sometimes by re-encountering certain kinds of artworks now, past intervals or phases ‘behind one’ can be ‘made present’ in a way that the paper aims to make plain. I also explain to what extent phasic recollection might be understood as a form of mental time travel, and what the attendant phenomenology of ‘transportation’ involves. (shrink)

The article deals with the formation of understanding and interpretation of the phenomenon of memory in the European philosophical tradition. The historical-cultural and linguistic-semantic connections of the ideological paradigm of Ancient Greek thinkers and philosophers are researched. In article revealded a peculiarities of the main philosophical categories of Plato’s philosophy in the context of explaining the phenomenon of memory and memories. We realized a distinction for better understanding of the phenomenon of memory for ancient culture into two branches: 1) memory (...) as a natural property of man and 2) memory as a technique, as a skill for perfection, as an instrument. We emphasize that ancient categories: eidos, logos and cosmos are the central of the theory of memory of the western tradition, which we can also observe in the treatises left by Plato. Also we analyzed the connection between the Platonian theory of memory and the development of knowledge about memory paradigm. Memory for Plato is determined by a metaphysical character, like immortal knowledge, it is a way of human transcendence. An intelligent soul for Plato is the translator of eternal knowledge of things through which we learn not only the world, but also receive knowledge about ourselves, our true perceptual perception, and represent our ideas in real forms. The soul of man for Plato, due to memory, connects human existence from outside the physical space and time, where there is simultaneously the past, present and future, which at the metaphysical level are united into a concrete conceptual design of memory. Thus, the Platonic theory of memory as a reproduction of knowledge can not relate to the development of the art of memory, but has a direct connection with the development of the paradigm of knowledge about memory and allows us to understand the concept of memory as a philosophical and cultural phenomenon. We noted that the theory of Plato’s memory resembles the same categories as the art of memory, it is a category of “place” bearing memory-reflection in the memory of the soul and “image” of true knowledge. (shrink)

The recent development of specialized research fields in philosophy of memory and philosophy of perception invites a dialogue about the relationship between these mental capacities. Following a brief review of some of the key issues that can be raised at the interface of memory and perception, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, and outlines possible directions for further research.

ABSTRACT The contemporary epistemological debate regarding the epistemic role of memory is dominated by the dispute between two different views: memory preservationism and memory generativism. While the former holds that memory only preserves the epistemic status already acquired through another source, the latter advocates that there are situations where memory can function as a generative epistemic source. Both views are problematic and have to deal with important objections. In this paper, I suggest a novel argument for granting memory the status (...) of a generative source of justification and knowledge that overcomes objections raised for both preservationism and generativism. I shall call this view Memory Compatibilism. I argue that the proposed view better explains the generative epistemic character of memory.RESUMO O debate epistemológico contemporâneo acerca do papel epistêmico da memória tem sido dominado pela disputa entre duas visões diferentes: o preservacionismo da memória e o gerativismo da memória. Enquanto o primeiro sustenta que a memória apenas preserva o status epistêmico já adquirido via outra fonte, o último defende que existem situações em que a memória pode funcionar como uma fonte epistêmica geradora. Ambas as visões são problemáticas e têm de lidar com objeções importantes. Neste artigo, sugiro um novo argumento para conceder à memória o status de fonte geradora de justificação e conhecimento que supera as objeções levantadas contra o preservacionismo e o geracionismo. Chamarei esta visão de compatibilismo da memória. Argumento que a visão proposta melhor explica o caráter epistêmico gerativo da memória. (shrink)