New Directions in the Philosophy of 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 nineteen 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.

Kourken Michaelian is senior lecturer at the University of Otago. He is the author of Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past (MIT 2016) and coeditor of Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (2016) and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (2017).

Dorothea Debus teaches Philosophy at the University of York. She has written on philosophical questions relating to the phenomena of memory, the imagination, attention, and the emotions; her current research project ('Shaping Our Mental Lives') investigates our active involvement with our own mental lives.

Denis Perrin is the author of Qu’est-ce que se souvenir ? (2012), the editor of a special issue "Episodic memory" of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2014) and the author of several papers on episodic memory and mental time travel.