Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism

ISBN-13: 9780521591942 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 392 str.

John Sutton

Opis

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 that 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. John Sutton juxtaposes historical and contemporary debates to show that psychology can attend to culture, complexity, self, and history.

Recenzje

'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

Spis treści

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.