New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory

✍ Scribed by Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus, and Denis Perrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 362
• Series: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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 seventeen 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.

About the Author
Kourken Michaelian is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago. He is the author of Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past (MIT 2016) and coeditor of Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (2016), and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (2017).

Dorothea Debus teaches philosophy at the University of York. She has written on philosophical questions relating to the phenomena of memory, the imagination, attention, and emotions; her current research project ("Shaping Our Mental Lives") investigates our active involvement with our own mental lives.

Denis Perrin is the author of Qu’est-ce que se souvenir? (2012), the editor of a special issue "Episodic memory" of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2014), and the author of several papers on episodic memory and mental time travel.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
The Philosophy of Memory Today and Tomorrow: Editors’ Introduction
Part I Challenges and Alternatives to the Causal Theory of Memory
1 Beyond the Causal Theory? Fifty Years After Martin and Deutscher
2 A Case for Procedural Causality in Episodic Recollection
3 The Functional Character of Memory
Part II Activity and Passivity in Remembering
4 Remembering as a Mental Action
5 The Roots of Remembering: Radically Enactive Recollecting
6 Handle With Care: Activity, Passivity, and the Epistemological Role of Recollective Memories
Part III The Affective Dimension of Memory
7 Affective Memory: A Little Help From Our Imagination
8 Painful Memories
Part IV Memory in Groups
9 Shared Remembering and Distributed Affect: Varieties of Psychological Interdependence
10 Memory, Attention, and Joint Reminiscing
Part V Memory Failures: Concepts and Ethical Implications
11 Forgetting
12 On the Blameworthiness of Forgetting
13 Consent Without Memory
Part VI The Content and Phenomenology of Episodic and Semantic Memory
14 The Remembered: Understanding the Content of Episodic Memory
15 The Past Made Present: Mental Time Travel in Episodic Recollection
16 Remembering Past Experiences: Episodic Memory, Semantic Memory, and the Epistemic Asymmetry
17 On Seeming to Remember
Contributors
Index