Aristotle's collection of memory phenomena displays some systematicity, and with characteristic insight, he lights on several basically correct classifications. Nevertheless, to modern eyes some of his collection is a bit of a jumble, and the mechanical explanations tendered are so implausible that they must have been no more than helpful metaphors to him.
Aristotle's relentlessly naturalistic perspective, however, gives him a decidedly modern stamp. That is, he sought physical rather than supernatural or spiritual explanations for memory phenomena, and he well knew the importance of observations even though his own were occasionally mere assumptions. (For example, he thought women had fewer teeth than men.) In the absence of a developed biology, experimental psychology, or neuroscience, he could hardly be expected either to envisage explanations in terms of neuronal connectivity or to know how to penetrate learning phenomena at the behavioral level.
Observations and Explanations
In commenting upon memory and learning phenomena, Aristotle's fundamental distinction is between recalling information to mind and storing information, or, as he puts it, between remembering, which is "the reinstatement in consciousness of something that was there before" (451b6), and memory, "the existence, potentially, in the mind" (452a10), of an earlier perception or conception.
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