Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism
Cambridge University Press (1998)
| Abstract | 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 | |||||||||
| Keywords | Body Connectionism Memory Metaphysics Self Descartes | |||||||||
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| Buy the book | $60.45 used (27% off) $63.84 new (23% off) $70.93 direct from Amazon (14% off) Amazon page | |||||||||
| Call number | BD181.7.S88 1998 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 0521591945 0521039371 9780521591942 | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesJohn Heil (1978). Traces of Things Past. Philosophy of Science 45 (March):60-72.
John Sutton (2002). Cognitive Conceptions of Language and the Development of Autobiographical Memory. Language and Communication 22 (3):375-390.
David G. Stern (1991). Models of Memory: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science. Philosophical Psychology 4 (2):203-18.
Christoph Hoerl (2000). Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. [REVIEW] British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (4):923-926.
John Sutton (1999). Distributed Memory, Coupling, and History. In R. Heath, B. Hayes, A. Heathcote & C. Hooker (eds.), Dynamical Cognitive Science: Proceedings of the Fourth Australasian Cognitive Science Conference. University of Newcastle.
Carol Skrenes (2000). Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. [REVIEW] Dialogue 39 (02):400-.
Celia Wolf-Devine (2000). Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. [REVIEW] The Review of Metaphysics 54 (2):459-461.
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