Remembering without stored contents

a philosophical reflection on memory

Daniel Hutto

pp. 229-236

in: Sebastian Groes (ed), Memory in the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

And so I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are stored the innumerable images of material things brought to it by the senses. Further there is stored in the memory the thoughts we think, by adding or taking from or otherwise modifying the things that sense has made contact with and all other things that have been entrusted to and laid up in memory … when I turn to memory I ask it to bring forth what I want …1