Rilkean Memory The exploration of the role of the act of remembering in constructing – or, as I prefer, sculpting – the content of episodic memory begins with the identification of a novel form of remembering that I call Rilkean memory, after the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who provided …
The Presence of the Self in Memory In Memory and the Self, I operated with a claim that was, in hindsight, perhaps made a little too blithely. The essence of episodic memory, I argued, is that it presents an episode (a certain kind of state-of-affairs) in a specific way. You …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my new book, Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography (Oxford University Press NY, 2016). *** Memory and the Autobiographical Self: The Problem Intuitively, it is not unreasonable to suppose that our episodic memories play a significant …
Some philosophers of science have suggested that scientific discussions of “reductionism” and “emergentism” are merely rhetorical funding grabs. But drawing together my work in earlier parts of the book, in the final section, Part IV, I outline how we are in substantive, ongoing and empirically resolvable scientific debates about the …
Part III of the book focuses on reconstructing the scientific emergentism of writers like Anderson, Freeman, Laughlin, Prigogine, and others, and providing a theoretical framework for its claims. I argue that scientific emergentism is a philosophically overlooked, and profoundly important position, that I dub ‘Mutualism’ with a range of novel …
The widespread philosophical view is that reductionism in the sciences is a dead view and perhaps slightly distasteful to boot. As I outlined in an earlier post, the received view assumes that “reductionism” is semantic, or Nagelian, reduction. The goal of such semantic reduction was to show that higher sciences …
Understanding the nature of “vertical” relations whether in science, nature, mathematics, logic, or anywhere else, is a hot topic in philosophy. What is unfortunate is that, as yet, too little attention is paid to focused issues about what frameworks work best for the “vertical” relations in particular areas. However, it …
