Online research in philosophy

Prospective memory is required for many aspects of everyday cognition, its breakdown may be as debilitating as impairments in retrospective memory, and yet, the former has received relatively little attention by memory researchers. This article outlines a strategy for changing the fortunes of prospective memory, for guiding new research to shore up the claim that prospective memory is a distinct aspect of cognition, and to obtain evidence for clear performance dissociations between prospective memory and other memory functions. We begin by identifying the unique requirements of prospective memory tasks and by dividing memory's prospective functions into subdomains that are analogous to divisions in retrospective memory (e.g., short- versus long-term memory). We focus on one prospective function, called prospective memory proper; we define this function in the spirit of James (1890) as requiring that we are aware of a plan, of which meanwhile we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we made the plan earlier. We give an operational definition of prospective memory proper and specify how it differs from explicit and implicit retrospective memory and how it might be empirically assessed.

Much of ordinary memory is autobiographical; memory of what one saw and did, where and when. It may derive from your own past experiences, or from what other people told you about your past life. It may be phenomenologically rich, redolent of that autumn afternoon so long ago, or a few austere reports of what happened. But all autobiographical memory is first-person memory, stateable using ‘I’. It is a memory you would express by saying, ‘I remember I . . .’.

In spite (or because) of the infinity of (the) voice, of the boundless mystery it carries and exhales, of its disembodied traversing and joining, sayings follow barely traced courses. They travel along fragile lines of memory, often discontinuous bridges, transpositions into notational forms. They travel alone, exposed to corruption, consuming friction, repetition - their beginning and final destination often lost to those who listen to them and send them past. In spite of the power of memory and its arts, there are sayings and stories handed down to us in fragments, like decapitated Níke and disfigured Diónysos. There are poems reaching us, race of diggers and preservers, through somebody else's reminiscence, recovery, or loving quotation. In turn, our receiving and sending (stretching) forth, our being thus traversed, shares something with the destiny of these sayings and sculpted deities - being sent, crossing and (un)covering distances, in the fragmented continuity of dialogues, or what remains of them. The present essay is devoted to a meditation on the question of temporality and history in its epistemologico-metaphysical implications. It is developed mainly by reference to Aristotle, after Heidegger.

Content externalism about memory says that the individuation of memory contents depends on relations the subject bears to his past environment. I defend externalism about memory by arguing that neither philosophical nor psychological considerations stand in the way of accepting the context dependency of memory that follows from externalism.

There is considerable contemporary interest in memory, both within the academy and in the public sphere. Little has been written by moral philosophers on the subject, however. In this timely book, Jeffrey Blustein explores the moral aspects and implications of memory, both personal and collective. He provides a systematic and philosophically rigorous account of a morality of memory, focusing on the value of memory, its relationship to identity, and the responsibilities associated with memory.

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” – Luis Buñuel..

Based on a new critical edition of Aristotle's "De Memoria" and two interpretive essays, this book challenges current views on Aristotle's theories of memory ...

Selon l'argument adopté ici, aucune des grandes théorisations traditionnelles de la mémoire en Occident — la réminiscence platonicienne, la mémoire comme garant de l'identité personnelle au sens de Locke, la remémoration hégélienne du parcours de l'Esprit — n'est en mesure de nous aider à dégager la spécificité de ce phénomène, tel qu'il se montre dans le contexte contemporain. A la suite du défi lancé par Nietzsche dans la Seconde considération intempestive, et en tenant compte des sombres épreuves du xxe siècle, nous nous trouvons face à l'obligation de repenser ce que signifie « se souvenir » . Cet article réfléchit sur la possibilité d'envisager une théorie de la mémoire qui, tout en évitant les connotations métaphysiques de la réminiscence platonicienne, ne se trouve pas pour autant cantonnée au domaine lockien de l'identité personnelle. Il s'agit alors de promouvoir le thème d'une mémoire plurielle qui, en renonçant à la certitude absolue au sens de Hegel, nous permet de sonder une mémoire collective qui serait moins du côté de la légitimation identitaire que de celui de la manifestation des inconsistances, des failles, des refoulements touchant au coeur de notre existence plurielle contemporaine. According to this article, none of the great traditions of reflection on memory in the West — neither Platonic reminiscence, nor Lockean memory at the foundation of personal identity, nor Hegelian remémoration of the movement of the Spirit— is capable of helping us comprehend the exact character of memory in the contemporary context. Following the challenge of Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation, and in view of the somber experience of the 20th century, it has become necessary to rethink the meaning of memory. This article reflects on the possibility of formulating a theory of memory which, in avoiding the metaphysical connotations of Platonic reminiscence, does not for this reason enclose itself within the domain of Lockean personal identity. The problem of memory thus becomes one of envisaging a plural memory which, in renouncing absolute certitude in the Hegelian sense, permits us to focus on collective memory which would serve less as a means of legitimization of identity than as a mode of manifestation of incoherence, inconsistency, and repression that reach to the heart of our contemporary socio-political existence.