The Epistemological Role of Recollective Memories
Today’s post is by Dorothea Debus , Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. Together with Kirk Michaelian and Denis Perrin I've recently edited a collection of newly commissioned papers in the philosophy of memory ( New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory , Routledge 2018 ), and I've been invited to say something about my own contribution to that collection here. My paper bears the title " Handle with Care: Activity, Passivity, and the Epistemological Role of Recollective Memories ", and it is concerned with one particular type of memory, namely with memories that have experiential characteristics. The paper starts from the observation that such experiential or 'recollective' memories (here: 'R-memories') have characteristic features of activity as well as characteristic features of passivity : A subject who experiences an R-memory is characteristically passive with respect to the occurrence of the R-memory its...