John Sutton
Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
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Publication Details
Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism
Cambridge University Press, March 1998
Hardback; 228 x 152 mm; 372pp; 5 line diagrams, 2 tables
ISBN: 0 521 59194 5; £40.00, US $69.95
You can order the book from Amazon.com
or from Cambridge
University Press.
Description
Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of
autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view
of
memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids
which rummaged through the pores of brain and body.
The other is new
connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’
only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than
reproduced.
Both
models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed
representation,
which brings
interference and confusion between memory traces. Both
raise
urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about
relations
between
self and body.
The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of
Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange
philosophy of the
body. English critics
of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic
neurophilosophy
could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for
controlling
the brain. In a new account of 18th-century
philosophers’ fears of
confusion
in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids
in
moral physiology,
as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge
struggled
to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on
‘the
phantasmal
chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against
Jerry
Fodor and against phenomenological
and Wittgensteinian critics of
passive
mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are
implicated
in
contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in
historical
cognitive science, based on a belief that the
interdisciplinary study
of
memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and
culture
towards which
psychological sciences must aim.
Table of Contents
Preface
1
Introduction: traces, brains, and history
Appendix: memory and connectionism
Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction
to Part I (html version ... or earlier draft here
in rtf)
2
Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits [New
online - draft version (not identical to published chapter) in
rtf]
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory
Part II Inner discipline
Introduction
to Part II
4
Spirit sciences, memory motions [New online - draft
version (not identical to published chapter) in
rtf]
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes'
theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8
The puzzle of survival [New online - draft
version (not identical to published chapter) in
rtf]
9 Spirits, body, and self
10
The puzzle of elimination [New online - draft
version (not identical to published chapter) in
rtf]
Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction
to Part III
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge
Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction
to Part IV
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering
References
Index
Last updated 27 March 2005
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