Memory
Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. In particular, personal memory—the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it—often has intense emotional or moral significance: It is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of humans' limited but genuine freedom from their present environment and immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self.
The philosophy of memory is a fascinating, diverse, and underdeveloped area of study, which offers difficult but rewarding connections not only with psychology and the cognitive sciences, but also with the social sciences and political theory, and with literature and the arts. Outside philosophy, interest in memory increased massively and disproportionately in the late twentieth century in both the neurocognitive sciences and the humanities, driven both by internal developments within disparate disciplines and by wider social and cultural concerns about trauma and recovered memories, about the politics of forgetting and collective responsibility, about memory loss in an aging population, and about the manipulation, control, ownership, and protection of individual memory.
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