This was the homepage for the 2003-2005 project 'Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Memory: cognition, culture, and complexity'.
John Sutton, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
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Two Workshops on Memory, Mind, and Media in Nov/ Dec 2004, and the resulting
    three special journal issues on memory and embodied cognition
Sydney Collective Memory Meeting, July 2006.

Here are resources, categorised bibliographies, links and online materials to support the
    Interdisciplinary Study of Memory (includes philosophy, cognitive and developmental psychology,
    recovered memory and false memory, social and collective memory, and history of theories of memory).
Here are my papers.

Graduate students working on the project:
John Buckmaster (PhD on memory and cinema, completing 2007)
Russell Downham (PhD on autobiographical memory and narrative, completing 2007)
Monte Pemberton (MA, 2003-2005)
Carl Windhorst (PhD on autobiographical memory in cognitive psychology, completing late 2006).

N.B. (mid-2006). This project has now been extended/ refined/ subsumed into three or more successor projects on
    i) From autobiographical memory to collective memory; ii) skill memory and kinesthetic memory; iii) memory and distributed cognition.
N.B. This page will no longer be regularly updated.  Please see my home page for relevant links to new research projects.

Some Sample Publications (for a full list see my publications page).
- (in press) 'Integrating the Philosophy and Psychology of Memory: two case studies', forthcoming in Mario de Caro, Francesco Ferretti,
    and Massimo Marraffa (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind:  the interplay between philosophy & psychology (Kluwer, 2006), 69-79.
- (in press) 'Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: history, the extended mind, and the civilizing process', in Richard Menary (ed),
    The Extended Mind  (Ashgate).
- (2006) 'Memory', Donald M. Borchert (ed), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd edition, Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference/
    Thomson Gale, 2006 [published December 2005]), volume 5, pp.122-8.
- (2004) 'Representation, Reduction, and Interdisciplinarity in the Sciences of Memory' [html, or here in pdf],  in  Hugh Clapin,
    Phillip Staines, and Peter Slezak (eds.), Representation in Mind: new approaches to mental representation (Elsevier), pp.187-216.
- (2003) 'Memory', in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Cite as (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
    URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/memory/>
- (2003) 'Constructive Memory and Distributed Cognition: towards an interdisciplinary framework', in Boicho Kokinov and
    William Hirst (eds.), Constructive Memory (Sofia: New Bulgarian University), 290-303.

Interdisciplinary in the Sciences of Memory: cognition, culture, & complexity
After some years researching the history of theories of memory, leading to my book Philosophy and Memory Traces,
I began in about 2001 to work on interdisciplinarity and levels of explanation in the (contemporary) sciences of memory.
    Memory is studied in many disciplines, at a bewildering variety of levels. Is there any sense in which memory theorists -
    from neurobiologists to narrative psychologists - are studying the same phenomena? Memory is a particularly intriguing
Obviously this is a hopelessly ambitious dream, and we continue to seek help from many quarters. Here is a kind of motto for
    the project, from Andy Clark who was a visiting scholar at Macquarie in 2004, and keynote speaker at the workshops on
    mind, media, and embodied cognition:
    'Much of what matters about human intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex
    and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two. … The study of these interaction spaces is not easy,
    and depends both on new multidisciplinary alliances and new forms of modelling and analysis. The pay-off, however,
    could be spectacular: nothing less than a new kind of cognitive scientific collaboration involving neuroscience, physiology,
    and social, cultural, and technological studies in about equal measure.' (Clark, Mindware, OUP 2001, p.154)

Here's a link to resources and bibliographies for the Interdisciplinary Study of Memory.
And related materials for the Interdisciplinary Study of Dreams.

The project divides up roughly thus:
1. Interdisciplinary Theory-Construction in the Sciences of Memory
   1.1 Reduction, Levels of Explanation, and Autonomy: case studies in neurobiology and cognitive psychology
    1.2 Memory Systems, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity, and the Nature of Explanation
2. Memory and the Embodied, Embedded, Extended Mind
   2.1 Memory and Dynamical Approaches in Cognitive Science
    2.2 The Metaphysics of Traces in Brain, Body, and World
3. Episodic Memory and Autobiographical Memory
   3.1 The Development of Autobiographical Memory: self, culture, and cognition
    3.2 Episodic Memory, Time, and Personal Identity
4. Social Memory: sciences of the interface
   4.1 Memory in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences
    4.2 Connectionism, Habit, and External Symbol Systems

May/ June 2003: reading group on Time and Memory.
August/ September 2006: reading group on Point of View in Personal Memory

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For further information contact
John Sutton, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Email me.
Back to my home page.

Last updated 26 August 2006.