Philosophy and Memory Traces
Descartes to Connectionism

This study offers interpretations of theories of memory and the body from Descartes to Coleridge.

John Sutton (Author)

9780521039376, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 August 2007

392 pages, 5 b/w illus. 2 tables
22.8 x 15.3 x 2.2 cm, 0.601 kg

'This is a remarkable book: elegantly written, impressive with regards to its scholarship and its attention to a wealth of relevant material (historical and contemporary), and exciting innovative in the ideas about memory, as the creative link between self and world.' Australian Journal of Philosophy

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 reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, 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. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science.

List of figures
Preface
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction: traces, brains and history
Part I. Animal Spirits and Memory Traces: Introduction
2. Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3. Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
Part II. Inner Discipline: Introduction
4. Spirit sciences, memory motions
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
8. The puzzle of survival
9. Spirits, body and self
10. The puzzle of elimination
Part III. 'The Phantasmal Chaos of Association': Introduction
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
15. Representations, realism and history
16. Attacks on traces
17. Order, confusion, remembering
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of mind [HPM], History of Western philosophy [HPC]