1st Edition

New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory

Edited By Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus, Denis Perrin Copyright 2018
    362 Pages
    by Routledge

    362 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    The philosophy of memory today and tomorrow: Editors' introduction

    Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus, and Denis Perrin

    Part I: Challenges and alternatives to the causal theory of memory

    1 Beyond the causal theory? Fifty years after Martin and Deutscher

    Kourken Michaelian and Sarah K. Robins

    2 A case for procedural causality in episodic recollection

    Denis Perrin

    3 The functional character of memory

    Jordi Fernández

    Part II: Activity and passivity in remembering

    4 Remembering as a mental action

    Santiago Arango-Muñoz and Juan Pablo Bermúdez

    5 The roots of remembering: Radically enactive recollecting

    Daniel D. Hutto and Anco Peeters

    6 Handle with care: Activity, passivity, and the epistemological role of recollective memories

    Dorothea Debus

    Part III: The affective dimension of memory

    7 Affective memory: A little help from our imagination

    Margherita Arcangeli and Jérôme Dokic

    8 Painful memories

    Philip Gerrans

    Part IV: Memory in groups

    9 Shared remembering and distributed affect: Varieties of psychological interdependence

    John Sutton

    10 Memory, attention, and joint reminiscing

    Felipe De Brigard

    Part V: Memory failures: Concepts and ethical implications

    11 Forgetting

    Matthew Frise

    12 On the blameworthiness of forgetting

    Sven Bernecker

    13 Consent without memory

    Carl F. Craver and R. Shayna Rosenbaum

    Part VI: The content and phenomenology of episodic and semantic memory

    14 The remembered: Understanding the content of episodic memory

    Mark Rowlands

    15 The past made present: Mental time travel in episodic recollection

    Matthew Soteriou

    16 Remembering past experiences: Episodic memory, semantic memory, and the epistemic asymmetry

    Christoph Hoerl

    17 On seeming to remember

    Fabrice Teroni

    Biography

    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.