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The surge of philosophical interest in episodic memory has brought to light a number of controversial questions about this form of memory that have only recently begun to be addressed in detail. This book organises discussion around six such questions, offering two new chapters per question, from experts in the field. The questions are:I. What is the relationship between memory and imagination?II. Do memory traces have content?III. What is the nature of mnemonic confabulation?IV. What is the function of episodic memory?V. Do non-human animals have episodic memory?VI. Does episodic memory give us knowledge of the past?The book constitutes a valuable resource for researchers, teachers, and students alike. For researchers, it provides an up-to-date discussion of some of the main theories, arguments, and problems in the area. For teachers, the book can supply the readings for an entire course, or particular sections can provide the readings for specific units within a broader philosophy of memory course. For students, the book offers accessible discussions of some of the most recent topics in the philosophy of memory, which, when taken together, serve as a well-rounded introduction to the area.

Memory. A word so often said, often thought of, and continuously studied. Yet, we know relatively so little other than how vast and magnificent it is. In Who Will Remember You? A Philosophical History and Theory of Memory and Will, Israel B. Bitton, offers an interdisciplinary perspective that unifies philosophy of memory with history, neuroscience, culture and ethics, yielding novel insights into the elusive phenomena of memory, namely its universality. Bitton posits that the current and typical “misunderstanding of memory” stems from over-specialization in scientific research, a compartmentalization that does not support reaching holistic conclusions which are necessary for fully appreciating the totality of memory phenomena. No longer should memory be thought of as residing only in the brain, for the body is known to have memory too, but neither should it be thought of as exclusively human since it inheres in all matter as a physical and biological fact. Indeed, Bitton extends the philosophical and practical meanings of memory furthest in great detail, employing the latest research in neuroscience to support his case.In this work, Bitton traces the kernels of these ideas from the ancient Egyptians and Israelites all the way through to the modern period in philosophy, science and popular culture, demonstrating that his philosophical formulation has always been and remains accepted de facto by society as can easily be detected in various social trends. Upon offering his holistic account that considers the magnitude of memory phenomena across several disciplines, Bitton presents a novel theory that postulates the primary human drive as categorized by a will to significance, which, because of the universality of memory becomes a will to memorability. By placing the individual at the center of their own memory-reality, they can be empowered to safeguard, enhance, and extend the universal force of memory within and around them.From that vantage point, this book provides its audience with ideas meant to provoke and incite the readers'own reflections on memory's meaning and import as well as what it takes to be an ethical “memory agent” in an era of hyper-fake news.

Cultural Imprints draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual'imprints,'traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the'samurai age,'the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868. The range of methodologies and materials discussed in Cultural Imprints challenges a uniform notion of warrior activity and sensibilities, breaking down an ahistorical, monolithic image of the samurai that developed late in the samurai age and that persists today. Highlighting the memory of warfare and its centrality in the cultural realm, Cultural Imprints demonstrates the warrior's far-reaching, enduring, and varied cultural influence across centuries of Japanese history.Contributors: Monica Bethe, William Fleming, Andrew Goble, Thomas Hare, Luke Roberts, Marimi Tateno, Alison Tokita, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory serves as a timely and unique resource for the current boom in thinking around translation and memory. The Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of a contemporary, and as yet unconsolidated, research landscape with a four-section structure which encompasses both current debate and future trajectories. Twenty-four chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars provide a cross-sectional snapshot of the diverse angles of approach and case studies that have thus far driven research into translation and memory. A valuable, far-reaching range of theoretical, empirical, reflective, comparative, and archival approaches are brought to bear on translational sites of memory and mnemonic sites of translation through the examination of topics such as traumatic, postcolonial, cultural, literary, and translator memory. This Handbook is key reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in translation studies, memory studies, and related areas.

La creciente inmersión en la propia subjetividad es un signo de la época. Sin embargo, cuando esa expresión subjetiva se articula, de modo elíptico o declarado, al horizonte problemático de lo colectivo, adquiere connotaciones diferentes y despierta ecos que vale la pena interrogar. Memoria y autobiografía se propone justamente esa tarea: tratar de responder –en la doble acepción de respuesta y responsabilidad– a preguntas que surgen en torno de distintas narrativas del pasado reciente. Narrativas que, en la diversidad de sus registros –escrituras, filmes, debates, obras de arte visuales– muestran, con una insistencia sintomática, la huella perentoria de un pasado abierto como una herida. ¿Cómo se enlazan en ellas lo biográfico y lo memorial? ¿Qué formas adopta allí lo auto/biográfico? ¿De qué manera el relato configura la experiencia? ¿Cuál es el límite entre testimonio y ficción? Estos interrogantes guían una exploración donde dialogan formas no convencionales del testimonio, la auto/biografía y los relatos de vida con autoficciones literarias y ciertas prácticas de las artes visuales comprometidas con el conflictivo mundo actual. Leonor Arfuch despliega aquí una perspectiva de análisis innovadora, con particular sensibilidad a la escucha y la mirada, a la dimensión afectiva que inviste la experiencia –objetos, fotografías, lugares, moradas, recorridos– más allá de los hechos históricos que inquietan la memoria. Este libro se propone entonces superar los límites prefijados, tanto de los géneros discursivos como de campos del saber, y en esa exploración de zonas fronterizas –que incluye asimismo la frontera física– está también la de una escritura teórica que linda con lo poético.

History and memory rank as central themes in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. As one of the last philosophers of the 19th century, Nietzsche naturally belongs to the so-called ‘historical century'. The contentious exchange with the past and with antiquity – as much as the mechanisms, the dangers, and the lessons of memory and tradition – are continually examined and stand in close relationship with Nietzsche's vision of life and his project of human development. As Jacob Burckhardt once wrote of the cultural critique to his Basel colleague:'Fundamentally, you are always teaching history'(9/13/1882). Following Burckhardt's judgment, the contributors focus on the analysis of core questions in the philosophies of history and memory, and their respective convergence in the thought of Nietzsche. The epistemological relevance of these central concepts will be thematized alongside those concerning tradition, and education. The discussion of these rich themes unifies a broad spectrum of questions, ranging from cultural memory to contemporary philosophy of mind. The contributions are revised versions of selected papers presented at the 2018 conference of the annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society in Naumburg.

Augustine of Hippo, indisputably one of the most important figures for the study of memory, is credited with establishing memory as the inner source of selfhood and locus of the search for God. Yet, those who study memory in Augustine have never before taken into account his preaching. His sermons are the sources of memory's greatest development for Augustine. In Augustine's preaching, especially on the Psalms, the interior gives way to communal exterior. Both the self and search for God are re-established in a shared Christological identity and the communal labors of remembering and forgetting. This book opens with Augustine's early works and Confessions as the beginning of memory and concludes with Augustine's Trinity and preaching on Psalm 50 as the end of memory. The heart of the book, the work of memory, sets forth how ongoing remembering and forgetting in Christ are for Augustine are foundational to the life of grace. To that end, Augustine and his congregants go leaping in memory together, keep festival with abiding traces, and become forgetful runners like St. Paul. Remembering and forgetting in Christ, the ongoing work of memory, prove for Augustine to be actions of reconciliation of the distended experiences of human life-of praising and groaning, labouring and resting, solitude and communion. Augustine on Memory presents this new communal and Christological paradigm not only for Augustinian studies, but also for theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and interdisciplinary scholars of memory.

Reach into this trickbox of memory and rummage around: you may find a tiny spaceship, or perhaps a signpost, a parade, a raised fist, an entire museum. The essays in Trickbox of Memory: Essays on Power and Disorderly Pasts draw on literary criticism, post-qualitative inquiry, new materialism, and political activism to dismember and reanimate the field of memory studies. In the trickbox, concepts rub up against each other, pieces chip off, things leak, glitter gets everywhere. Things are damaged, their edges are ragged. Some show the potential for repair in the future. The chapters in this volume respond to the observation that in today's moment of political danger, “expected” pasts can easily be instrumentalized in the service of fascism. Trickbox of Memory interrupts the “expected” to throw history into disarray by focusing on the subtlety of how power relations are enacted and contested in reference to the past, assembling a transnational constellation of scholars and practitioners who offer new tricks for working critically with disorderly pasts.

This book by one of Latin America's leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space'– can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I'who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch's own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina's last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.

What is it to do justice to the absent victims of past injustice, given the distance that separates us from them? Grounded in political theory and guided by the literature on historical justice, W. James Booth restores the dead to their central place at the heart of our understanding of why and how to deal with past injustice. Testimonies and accounts from the race war in the United States, the Holocaust, post-apartheid South Africa, Argentina's Dirty War and the conflict in Northern Ireland help advance and defend Booth's claim that caring for the dead is a central part of addressing past injustice. Memory, Historic Injustice, and Responsibility is an insightful and original book on the relationship of past and present in thinking about what it means to do justice. A valuable addition to the currently available literature on historical justice, the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, history, and law.

Greek Memories aims to identify and examine the central concepts underlying the theories and practices of memory in the Greek world, from the archaic period to Late Antiquity, across all the main literary genres, and to trace some fundamental changes in these theories and practices. It explores the interaction and development of different'disciplinary'approaches to memory in Ancient Greece, which will enable a fuller and deeper understanding of the whole phenomenon, and of its specific manifestations. This collection of papers contributes to enriching the current scholarly discussion by refocusing it on the question of how various theories and practices of memory, recollection, and forgetting play themselves out in specific texts and authors from Ancient Greece, within a wide chronological span (from the Homeric poems to Plotinus), and across a broad range of genres and disciplines (epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, philosophy and scientific prose treatises).

Jordi Fern?ndez here offers a philosophical investigation of memory, one which engages with memory's philosophically puzzling characteristics in order to clarify what memory is. Memories interact with mental states of other types in a particular way, and they also have associated feelings that these other mental states lack. They are special in terms of their representational capacity too, since one can have memories of objective events as well as memories of one's own past experiences. Finally, memories are epistemically unique, in that beliefs formed on the basis of memories are protected from certain errors of misidentification, and are justified in a way which does not rely on any cognitive capacity other than memory. To explain these unique features, Fern?ndez proposes that memories have a particular functional role which involves past perceptual experiences and beliefs about the past. He suggests that memories have a particular content as well, namely that they represent themselves as having a certain causal origin. Fern?ndez then explains the feelings associated with our memories as the experience of some of the things that our memories represent, things such as our own past experiences, or the fact that memories originate in those experiences. He also accounts for the special justification for belief afforded by our memories in terms of the content that memories have. The resulting picture is a unified account of several philosophically interesting aspects of memory, one that will appeal to philosophers of mind, metaphysicians, and epistemologists alike.

This book investigates the fascinating concept of a continuum between human memory and memory of materials. The first part provides state-of-the-art information on shape memory alloys and outlines a brief history of memory from the ancient Greeks to the present day, describing phenomenological, philosophical, and technical approaches such as neuroscience. Then, using a wealth of anecdotes, data from academic literature, and original research, this short book discusses the concepts of post-memory, memristors and forgiveness, highlights the analogies between materials defects and memory traces in the human brain. Lastly, it tackles questions of how human memory and memory of materials work together and interact. With insights from materials mechanics, neuroscience and philosophy, it enables readers to understand and continue this open debate on human memory.

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole.

This collection of newly published essays examines our relationship to physical objects that invoke, commemorate, and honor the past. The recent destruction of cultural heritage in war and controversies over Civil War monuments in the US have foregrounded the importance of artifacts that embody history. The book invites us to ask: How do memorials convey their meanings? What is our responsibility for the preservation or reconstruction of historically significant structures? How should we respond when the public display of a monument divides a community? This anthology includes coverage of the destruction of Palmyra and the Bamiyan Buddhas, the loss of cultural heritage through war and natural disasters, the explosive controversies surrounding Confederate-era monuments, and the decay of industry in the U.S. Rust Belt. The authors consider issues of preservation and reconstruction, the nature of ruins, the aesthetic and ethical values of memorials, and the relationship of cultural memory to material artifacts that remain from the past. Written by a leading group of philosophers, art historians, and archeologists, the 23 chapters cover monuments and memorials from Dubai to Detroit, from the instant destruction of Hiroshima to the gradual sinking of Venice.

The concept of memory has always been a crucial topic in philosophical discourse. This book re-traces the thought of major philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, William James, José Luis Borges and Sigmund Freud to provide an in-depth exploration around several aspects of this timely issue. How is a memory formed? How can we bring into existence what has sunk into oblivion? What is the role of our instincts and inner drives in the constitution of memory? What is the connection between memory and forgetfulness, as well as that between mercy and remembrance? Focusing on these fundamental questions, the author presents a rich interconnection of concepts and ideas that build a significant work on the great theme of memory.

Dustin Peone argues that memory is the foundation of philosophical thought. This may seem strange to the contemporary reader, but it is something that philosophers themselves have known since before Socrates. Peone advocates a doctrine of “memory as philosophy” that ties philosophical recollection back to the wisdom of the Muses, daughters of Memory, who sing of “what was, is, and shall be.” Part One draws on the work of philosophers from Cicero to Vico to Bergson to articulate the meaning and significance of memory. Peone understands memory not merely in its psychological sense, but as the key to metaphysical and moral thinking. Part Two takes up the philosophical history of memory. Peone gives an overview of its role as both a speculative and technical instrument from ancient Greece through Renaissance Europe. Then with the rise of modernity and the critical philosophy of Descartes, the memory tradition falls into disrepute. Why did this happen? Was it accidental? Is a philosophical system grounded in memory possible after Descartes? In the final chapters, Montaigne and Hegel are analyzed as practitioners of “memory as philosophy” in the modern world.

For over fifty years the concept of memory has played a crucial role in a large number of academic and societal debates. The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? draws attention to the limits of the academic field of memory studies. It argues that the faculty of memory offers an inadequate response to the challenges of the present. The book sets up a dialogue between the philosophies of forgetting that underlie the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and the philosophies of memory that inform the work of Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. It builds on the idea that history is inseparable from a type of transience that cannot be counter-acted by the preserving work of memory and develops a new understanding of the phenomenon of forgetting in which the passage of time is asserted in thought and thus made productive.

This book illuminates how the ‘long eighteenth century'(1660-1800) persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing and visual art. Tracing the afterlives of the period from the 1980s to the present, it argues that these emerging and changing forms stage the period as a point of origin for the grounding of individual identity in personal memory, and as a site of foundational traumas that shape cultural memory.

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.

Nicht nur Individuen, sondern auch Kulturen bilden ein Gedächtnis aus, um Identitäten herzustellen, Legitimation zu gewinnen und Ziele zu bestimmen. Aleida Assmann fragt nach den verschiedenen Aufgaben kultureller Erinnerung, ihren Medien (wie Schrift, Bilder oder Denkmäler) sowie nach den Formen des Umgangs mit gespeicherten Wissen, bei denen neben Politik und Wissenschaft auch der Kunst eine wachsende Bedeutung zukommt. „Bei ihrem reichhaltigen Streifzug durch die Kulturgeschichte zeichnet Aleida Assmann die Bedeutung von Erinnerung bei Projekten der Identitätsbildung nach. … Der emotional ergreifendste, aber auch politisch brisanteste Aspekt dieses Rundgangs taucht auf jenen Seiten auf, wo die Nähe von Erinnerung und Situationen des Schocks oder Katastrophen ausgeleuchtet wird.“ Elisabeth Bronfen, Süddeutsche Zeitung

The idea that our memories, in some sense, make us who we are, is a common one-and not at all implausible. After all, what could make us who we are if not the things we have experienced, thought, felt and desired on these idiosyncratic pathways through space and time that we call lives? And how can we retain these experiences, thoughts, feelings and desires if not through memory? On the other hand, most of what we have experienced has been forgotten. And there is now a considerable body of evidence that suggests that, even when we think we remember, our memories are likely to be distorted, sometimes beyond recognition. Imagine writing your autobiography, only to find that that most of it has been redacted, and much of the rest substantially rewritten. What would hold this book together? What would make it the unified and coherent account of a life? The answer, Mark Rowlands argues, lies, partially hidden, in a largely unrecognized form of memory-Rilkean memory. A Rilkean memory is produced when the content of a memory is lost but the act of remembering endures, in a new, mutated, form: a mood, a feeling, or a behavioral disposition. Rilkean memories play a significant role in holding the self together in the face of the poverty and inaccuracy of the contents of memory. But Rilkean memories are important not just because of what they are, but also because of what they were before they became such memories. Acts of remembering sculpt the contents of memories out of the slabs of remembered episodes. Our acts of remembering ensure that we are in the content of each of our memories-present in the way a sculptor is present in his creation-even when this content is lamentably sparse and endemically inaccurate.

Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future. Francis O'Gorman shows how forgetting has been embraced as a requirement for modern existence and how our education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnects us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives that urge us to resist our collective amnesia. O'Gorman argues that such narratives, in rich but oblique ways, indicate our guilt about modernity's great unmooring from history. Forgetfulness asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.

Memory occupies a fundamental place in philosophy, playing a central role not only in the history of philosophy but also in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Yet the philosophy of memory has only recently emerged as an area of study and research in its own right.The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory is an outstanding reference source on the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting area, and is the first philosophical collection of its kind. The forty-eight chapters are written by an international team of contributors, and divided into nine parts: The nature of memory The metaphysics of memory Memory, mind, and meaning Memory and the self Memory and time The social dimension of memory The epistemology of memory Memory and morality History of philosophy of memory. Within these sections, central topics and problems are examined, including: truth, consciousness, imagination, emotion, self-knowledge, narrative, personal identity, time, collective and social memory, internalism and externalism, and the ethics of memory. The final part examines figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Augustine, Freud, Bergson, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, as well as perspectives on memory in Indian and Chinese philosophy.Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind and psychology, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as psychology and anthropology.

Ich vergesse - Diese erschreckende Feststellung wird innerhalb der Geschichte der Philosophie in unterschiedlicher Weise begleitet von einem philosophischen Staunen; einem Staunen über die eindrückliche und gleichzeitig rätselhafte Fähigkeit des Menschen, an sich selbst Vergessen zu bemerken. Die Untersuchung der Formen individuellen Vergessens führt vor Augen, inwiefern der Mensch seinem Denken selbstbestimmt eine Richtung geben kann und auch, inwieweit dies nicht gelingt. Sie liefert damit einen Beitrag zu einer aktuellen Theorie des Gedächtnisses aus geisteswissenschaftlicher, insbesondere philosophischer Perspektive.

Episodic memory is a major area of research in psychology. Initially viewed as a distinct store of information derived from experienced episodes, episodic memory is understood today as a form of mental'time travel'into the personal past. Recent research has revealed striking similarities between episodic memory-past-oriented mental time travel-and future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT). Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel brings together leading contributors in both empirical and theoretical disciplines to present the first interdisciplinary look at the human ability to imagine future scenarios. Chapters focus on the challenging conceptual and theoretical questions raised by FMTT, covering themes such as: varieties of future-oriented cognition; relationships between FMTT and episodic memory; subjective temporality in FMTT; the self in FMTT; and functional, evolutionary and comparative, developmental, and clinical perspectives on FMTT. With its focus on the conceptual issues at the heart of fast-developing research on FMTT, this edited volume will serve graduate students to senior scholars working on or interested in FMTT and related areas as a synthesis of current theoretical thinking and a source of questions for future FMTT research.

This book maps and analyses the changing state of memory at the start of the twenty-first century in essays written by scientists, scholars and writers. It recontextualises memory by investigating the impact of new conditions such as the digital revolution, climate change and an ageing population on our world.

In On the Difficulty of Living Together, Manuel Cruz launches a nuanced study of memory and forgetting, defining their forms and uses, political meanings, and social and historical implications. Memory is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon, he argues, but an impressionable and malleable one, used to advance a variety of agendas. Cruz focuses on five memory models: that which is inherently valuable, that which legitimizes the present, that which supports retributive justice, that which is essential to mourning, and that which elicits renunciation or revelation. His methodical approach makes sense of memory's positive and negative effects, its contradictions, and its tensions. Cruz shows us that remembering is not necessarily an end in itself, nor is it a supreme value, immune to external influence. The exercise of memory guarantees nothing, though many insist it is a progressive act preventing the repetition of past mistakes. Tying the making of memory to the movements of history, Cruz prioritizes memory's political dimensions over its philosophical aspects and helps us remember its myriad uses.

Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past. In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. Current philosophical approaches to memory rest on assumptions that are incompatible with the rich body of theory and data coming from psychology. Michaelian argues that abandoning those assumptions will result in a radically new philosophical understanding of memory. His novel, integrated account of episodic memory, memory knowledge, and their evolution makes a significant step in that direction.Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive memory, he develops an innovative simulation theory of memory; finding no intrinsic difference between remembering and imagining, he argues that to remember is to imagine the past. He investigates the reliability of simulational memory, focusing on the adaptivity of the constructive processes involved in remembering and the role of metacognitive monitoring; and he outlines an account of the evolution of episodic memory, distinguishing it from the forms of episodic-like memory demonstrated in animals.Memory research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Michaelian's account, built systematically on the findings of empirical research, not only draws out the implications of these findings for philosophical theories of remembering but also offers psychologists a framework for making sense of provocative experimental results on mental time travel.

In the ongoing flood of studies of memory in its manifold forms and meanings, the no less powerful subject of forgetting tends to be forgotten. We often think of forgetting as a passive process, something that simply “happens” to us and to other living beings; but many of the studies in this inter-disciplinary volume reveal the active and even creative nature of forgetting, its positive features, and its varied roles in a wide series of cultural and intercultural templates. Neuroscientists joined with historians, philologists, a linguist, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists, an archaeologist and an artist in the two joint workshops that generated this volume, under the auspices of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The lively exchanges in the workshops are reflected in the comments and discussion that follow many of these experimental, meditative essays.

An intriguing analysis of how place constructs memory and how memory constructs place, Remembering the Holocaust shows how visiting sites such as Auschwitz shapes the transfer of Holocaust memory from one generation to the next. Through the discussion of a range of memoirs and novels, including Landscapes of Memory by Ruth Kluger, Too Many Men by Lily Brett, The War After by Anne Karpf and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Remembering the Holocaust reveals the pivotal yet complicated role of place in each generation's writing about the Holocaust.This book provides an insightful and nuanced investigation of the effect of the Holocaust upon families, from survivors of the genocide to members of the second and even third generations of families involved. By deploying an innovative combination of generational and literary study of Holocaust survivor families focussed on place, Remembering the Holocaust makes an important contribution to the field of Holocaust Studies that will be of interest to scholars and anyone interested in Holocaust remembrance.

This book is the first of its kind: an exploration of the experiences of the Third Generation - the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors - who have particular relationships to the Holocaust, mediated through their interactions with their parents, grandparents, and communities. The book's editors innovatively combine scholarly work that deals with questions of trauma and its transmission across generations, with autobiographical accounts which incorporate many of the concerns raised by scholars. The contributors include historians, literary and cultural studies scholars, psychologists, and sociologists, together with autobiographical narratives from members of the Third Generation, which illuminate the scholarly research presented. •••''At a moment when even the last of the Holocaust survivors will soon no longer be able to speak to us directly, In the Shadows of Memory introduces a diverse third generation of grandchildren, all asking what it means to be part of another'last'cohort, who still knew and lived among the survivors - with their trauma and their resilience - in ways that the next generation will not.they grapple with the problematic questions of'legacy','generational transmission', and historical responsibility, providing us with a challenging and pioneering contribution to the future of Holocaust memory.''-- Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Cooper Union, New York ••• Librarians: ebook available [Subject: Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, Sociology, History]

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history.