Book review: Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory

Abstract

Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory is a specialist book that aims to offer to researchers, teachers and students an ‘up-to-date discussion of some of the main theories, arguments, and problems’ in the philosophy of memory (p. 3). To this end, the editors have selected only contributions on episodic memory, that is, the ability to remember past events or experiences. In my view, this selective focus is reasonable and justified. There is increasing interest in episodic memory in philosophy, but several important questions have not received enough attention in the growing literature on the topic. This book investigates some of these previously underexplored questions, each addressed by two authors offering different perspectives on them. In addition to the editors’ introduction, which carefully contextualises these questions in the broader literature, the book has six parts, each including two chapters, a list of further readings and a final section with study questions. Part 1 of the volume addresses the question: What is the relationship between memory and imagination? This question is central to the debate between two prominent theories of memory: the causal theory and the simulation theory. The causal theory holds that remembering requires a causal connection to a past event via a memory trace – a brain modification caused by an experience – while the simulation theory claims that this requirement is not necessary. Because of their different takes on this causal requirement, the causal theory is usually associated with the idea that memory and imagination are two different things, while the simulation theory is associated with the idea that remembering is a form of imagining. Part I evaluates whether this presentation of this debate is accurate. In chapter 1, Peter Langland-Hassan uses the notion of constructive imagination to investigate the constraints that different types of memory traces impose on remembering. He explains how, by adopting the prop theory of memory traces, we can explain remembering as a form of constructive imagination while endorsing the causal theory. César Schirmer dos Santos, Christopher McCarroll and André Sant’Anna take a different stance on this debate (chapter 2). They claim that it is not all about descriptions of the mechanisms of remembering but is rather prescriptive in character: it is about the right concepts we should use to track memory and imagination. According to the authors, whether memory and imagination are the same thing depends on the prescriptive concepts of memory and imagination we endorse. These chapters do not solve the current debate on the relationship between memory and imagination but certainly advance it. They show that so far it has implied too sharp distinctions between the causal theory and the simulation theory and that, with proper conceptual analysis, we can identify what is at stake in this debate more clearly. 1176043 MSS0010.1177/17506980231176043Memory StudiesBook reviews book-review2023