The viability of a naïve realist theory of memory was a lively debate for philosophers of mind in the first half of the twentieth century. More recently, though, naïve realism has been largely abandoned as a non-starter in the memory literature, with representationalism being the standard view held by philosophers of memory. But rather than being carefully argued, the dismissal of naïve realism is an assumption that sits at the back of much recent theorizing in the philosophy (...) of memory. In this paper, we identify three reasons why philosophers of memory have felt compelled to outright reject naïve realism. We argue that none of those reasons are successful. Thus, far from being a non-starter, we argue that naïve realism is a theoretical perspective that needs to be given serious consideration in current philosophy of memory debates. (shrink)

We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory—a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real‐life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1–3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies (...) show that a unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was an eminent theorist across the fields of philosophy, physical chemistry and economics. Elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his contributions to research in the social sciences, and his theories on positivism and knowledge, are of critical academic importance. The three lectures included in this comprehensive volume, first published in 1959, argue for Polanyi’s principle of ‘tacit knowing’ as a fundamental component of knowledge. They were intended to accompany Polanyi’s earlier (...) work, Personal Knowledge , and as a tribute to the philosophical and educational work of Lord A. D. Lindsay. (shrink)

What is reductionism? -- Who is reading the book of life? -- Genetics : from grammar to meaning making -- A point for thought : why are organisms irreducible? -- A point for thought : does the genetic system include a meta-language? -- Immunology : from soldiers to housewives -- A point for thought : immune specificity and Brancusi's kiss -- A point for thought : reflections on the immune self -- Meaning making in language and biology -- A point (...) for thought : meaning : bridging the gap between physics and semantics -- The rest is silence -- The polysemy of the sign : a quantum lesson -- Recursive-hierarchy : a lesson from the tardigrade -- Context and memory : a lesson from funes the memorious -- Transgradience : a lesson from Bakhtin -- The poetry of living. (shrink)

William Tyndale, the Bible translator and Reformation martyr, enjoyed a sudden revival of interest in the mid-nineteenth century. This article examines one important aspect of his Victorian rehabilitation – his memorialization in stone and bronze. It analyses the campaigns to,erect two monuments in his honour – a tower on Nibley Knoll in Gloucestershire, inaugurated in 1866; and a statue in central London, on the Thames Embankment, unveiled in 1884. Both enjoyed wide support across the political and ecclesiastical spectrum of (...) Protestantism, and anti-Catholicism was especially prominent in the first initiative. Both monuments emphasized the blessings of the Bible in English, the importance of religious liberty, and the prosperity of England and the Empire as a result of its Reformation heritage. The article argues that controversy concerning Tractarianism and biblical criticism was brushed under the carpet, and Tyndales distinctive evangelical theology was deliberately downplayed, in order to present the martyr as a unifying figure attractive to a broad Protestant coalition. (shrink)

Sven Bernecker’s contribution to the ongoing revival in the philosophy of memory offers a consistent vision and analysis of propositional remembering, and covers a range of topics in analytic metaphysics and epistemology. Bernecker defends a methodological externalism, by which memory ‘must be analyzed from a third-person point of view’ (34): so even though conceptual analysis remains the primary method, the ‘linguistic intuitions’ that guide it ‘are not a priori but empirical working hypotheses’ (31). Given the central role (...) of such intuitions in Bernecker’s treatment of many briefly described thought experiments throughout the book, it is strange that he does not defend their use more explicitly in this early section on method, instead leaving it to a later footnote (147, n. 11) to say that ‘trying to defend the use of intuitions in the philosophy of memory would . . . take us too far afield’. Bernecker’s subtitle signals a restricted target audience: this is a book for those analytic philosophers who will enjoy long exegeses on Twin Earth, slow switching or quasi-memory. Psychological results on memory are cited, but only piecemeal, and interactive dialogue with scientific theory is not Bernecker’s aim. (shrink)

[Michael Tye] Externalism about thought contents has received enormous attention in the philosophical literature over the past fifteen years or so, and it is now the established view. There has been very little discussion, however, of whether memory contents are themselves susceptible to an externalist treatment. In this paper, I argue that anyone who is sympathetic to Twin Earth thought experiments for externalism with respect to certain thoughts should endorse externalism with respect to certain memories. /// [Jane Heal] Tye (...) claims that an externalist should say that memory content invoking natural kind concepts floats free of the setting where the memory is laid down and is at later times determined by the context in which the memory is revived. His argument assumes the existence of 'slow switching' of the meaning of natural kind terms when a person is transported from Earth to Twin Earth. But proper understanding of natural kind terms suggests that slow switching is likely never to be completed. Hence the situation of a person unknowingly transported to Twin Earth is not that his memories switch content but rather that he gets two natural kinds confused. (shrink)

The article focuses on the link between memory, folk narratives, and critical thinking. I suggest in particular that there are instances in which the transmission of a folkloric story, such as a legend or a tale, can intersect with a person’s life experiences and facilitate the articulation of critical perspectives on society that might otherwise go unexpressed. The opportunity for discussing this idea is offered by the work of early twentieth-century Chicago sociologist Jane Addams. In her book The Long (...) Road of Woman’s Memory (1916) Addams dealt with the modern revival of an ancient legend and investigated its interplay with the recollections, grievances, and aspirations of working-class women. (shrink)

The memory wave in the humanities has contributed to the impressive revival of cultural history, but the success of memory studies has not been accompanied by significant conceptual and methodological advances in the research of collective memory processes. Most studies on memory focus on the representation of specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past (...) and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness. This methodological problem is even enhanced by the metaphorical use of psychological and neurological terminology, which misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory as an effect and extension of individual, autobiographical memory. Some of these shortcomings can be addressed through the extensive contextualization of specific strategies of representation, which links facts of representation with facts of reception. As a result, the history of collective memory would be recast as a complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers. The negotiations among these three different historical agents create the rules of engagement in the competitive arena of memory politics, and the reconstruction of these negotiations helps us distinguish among the abundance of failed collective memory initiatives on the one hand and the few cases of successful collective memory construction on the other. For this purpose, collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception, and continue to use a wide range of interpretive tools from traditional historiography to poststructural approaches. From the perspective of collective memory studies, these two traditions are closely related and mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive, ways of analyzing historical cultures. (shrink)

The paper aims to provide an account of the phenomenological differences between perception, recognition and recall. In the first section, recall is distinguished from non-experiential forms of memory. In the second section, it is argued that we can't distinguish perceptual experience from the experience of recall by means of perception's present tense content because it is possible to perceive as well as to recall the past. The Lockean theory of recall as a revival of previous perceptual experience is (...) then introduced, applied and defended against objections. Next, recall is distinguish from memory recognition. Finally, some relevant psychological data is described. (shrink)

Marketers use autobiographical advertising as a means to create nostalgia for their products. This research explores whether such referencing can cause people to believe that they had experiences as children that are mentioned in the ads. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with Mickey Mouse as a child. Relative to controls, the ad increased their confidence that they personally had shaken hands with Mickey as a child at a Disney resort. The (...) increased confidence could be due to a revival of a true memory or the creation of a new, false one. In Experiment 2, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with an impossible character (e.g., Bugs Bunny). Again, relative to controls, the ad increased confidence that they personally had shaken hands with the impossible character as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence is consistent with the notion that autobiographical referencing can lead to the creation of false or distorted memory. ᭧ 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The article attempts to account for some conversational strategies for the thematic construction of discourse in a 30,000 word corpus of contemporary oral French. The sub-genre studied is that of the ‘memory-activation interview’, a speech situation, or ‘activity-type’ in which dialogues and meaning are co-constructed with the purpose of reviving memories. The general analytical framework is that of ‘interactional sociolinguistics’ as defined by Schiffrin, in which the more specific aspects of ratification, legitimization and modes of contribution are redefined and (...) diversified. Also central in the memory-activation process is the interviewer%'s role which, although not of a therapeutical nature is shown as being fully involved both at macro- and micro- levels. The article also tries to widen the range of the currently available tools for the analysis of speech seen as a thematic–rhematic process through the alternation of speech turns. The notion of thematic-discursive perimeter is introduced to account for thematic consistency. (shrink)

In contemporary scientific discourse, interest in memory problems has increased significantly. This trend, in our opinion, is due to a number of factors, among which one of the leading places is «democratization» of history. This process began to a large extent under the influence of a violent wave of emancipation of peoples and ethnic groups, which began at the end of the twentieth century. It actualized the need to rethink the past and revive a large part of the cultural (...) heritage of a number of ethnic and ethno-regional communities.Growth of attention to memory studios was facilitated by globalization. Itsliberal-oriented universalist intentions led to the erosion of the foundations of national identity without deprecating sociality as such. The fluidity and rapid change in social standards that have become a logical consequence of this process have shown the urgent need to find those ideological landmarks that can provide certainty at least on a daily basis. Here, a person feels the need for group consolidation, which is perceived directly through participation in social practices. Such practices reproduce the identity of the group and at the same time broadcast a historically formed and established system of group values. The revival of local forms of identity, which takes place under the influence of globalization in the conditions of the rapidity of social standards, can be regarded as a completely positive phenomenon. Meanwhile, in cases of politicization of collective memories, such local groups can significantly undermine the stable development of national states. The purpose of the study is to reveal the value of collective memories in the process of forming and preserving group identity.The task of the paper was to identify the universal foundations of human sociality and to reveal the importance of collective memories in the process of formation and preservation of group identity. Methods. The methodological basis of the study was the multidisciplinary approach, which was combined with the principles of objectivity and impartiality. The basic place in the process of scientific understanding of the role of memory in the process of formation and preservation of group identity was played by general scientific principles and methods, namely: the principles of historical and logical unity, objectivity, integrity and comprehensiveness. Also were used such general scientific methods as analysis and synthesis, induction, analogy, retrospective,comparison, etc. Along with the mentioned methods were widely used methods of cultural, social and categorical analysis, as well as the principles of philosophical hermeneutics. Results In the course of the study, M. Halbwachs’es implicit conclusion about the key role of collective memories in the process of formation of collective identity was refuted, some aspects of collective memory theory developed by him were specified. In particular, the provision on the decisive role of collective memory in the process of formation of group identity was revised and the importance of social friendship in the process of formation of the social community was shown, the persistence and moral significance of which is determined by common memories.Memories provide the appearance of images that become the status of collective identity symbols, which contain behavioral patterns and moral teachings for members of the community. Common memories can be transmitted through direct communication that covers a limited social space, or to be executed in a ritual and/or text. Due to rites or texts reinterpretations, a significant part of the memorization that is important for the collective identity can remain unchanged for a long time. (shrink)

Richard Goldschmidt was one of the most controversial biologists of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than fade from view, Goldschmidt's work and reputation has persisted in the biological community long after he has. Goldschmidt's longevity is due in large part to how he was represented by Stephen J. Gould. When viewed from the perspective of the biographer, Gould's revival of Goldschmidt as an evolutionary heretic in the 1970s and 1980s represents a selective reinvention of Goldschmidt that provides a contrast to (...) other kinds of biographical commemorations by scientists. (shrink)

The music of Christoph Willibald von Gluck was a revolution for Paris operagoers when his work premiered there in 1774. In a setting known for its restive and often rowdy spectators, Alceste, Iphigénie en Aulide, and Orpheé et Eurydice seized audiences with unprecedented force. They shed silent tears or sobbed openly, and some cried out in sympathy with the sufferers onstage. “Oh Mama! This is too painful!” three girls called out as Charon led Alcestis to the underworld, and a boy (...) pleaded with his father to take him home. A woman who watched the same performance described falling on her knees in her opera-box as the march of the priests of Apollo began, staying in this position “suppliant and with my hands clasped until the end of the piece.”Gluck's streamlined musical language was one reason for these emotional responses. He and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi simplified the conventions by eliminating extraneous subplots, abandoning the repetitive da capo form, and replacing trills and runs with simpler melodies meant to convey passion. Another reason was the widespread culture of sentimentalism, which equated virtue with sincerity and judged tears to be the natural sign of an open heart. Painters depicted tender and tumultuous family scenes, and friends pledged trembling vows of fidelity. Listeners were also readers, and many described similar tearful responses when they read the century's bestseller, Rousseau's novel Julie; or, The New Heloise.Everist, a musicologist, takes up the story of Gluck in France in the nineteenth century, when the German composer remained a presence in repertoires. No longer prone to tears, the public was often indifferent and sometimes hostile to his works. Conductors and composers nevertheless persisted in promoting Gluck's music. Between 1828 and 1870, operatic excerpts appeared roughly twice a year in performances of the prestigious Société des Concerts, and the charismatic conductor Jules Pasdeloup regularly programmed his music. Many listeners remained unconvinced. A writer in 1861 described the “sepulchral boredom that reigned the length of all five acts” of Alceste. The periodical Monde dramatique used the same language to characterize Gluck's music: it was “profoundly boring.” After a high point of performances in the middle of Napoleon III's reign, Gluck disappeared from the Paris opera and concert stage for some thirty years.Everist's aim in this slim book is to isolate the “agents” involved in the French reception of Gluck. Traditional reception histories might begin with Gluck and his aims, identifying musical features, particular responses of audiences, critics’ accounts, and perhaps the more elusive temper of the times. Everist focuses instead on less conspicuous networks of impresarios, theater directors, and publishers. In his telling, such agents also include journalists and writers of fiction. The avowed effort is to decenter the artist and his art to emphasize the limited role that composers and librettists play in the performance of an opera. A quoted passage in the book reminds us that without parking attendants, stagehands, and ticket sellers the show could not go on. True enough. Genealogies of Music and Memory therefore provides tables listing Gluck arias in anthologies, particular singers’ performances, works by composers other than Gluck who also drew themes from classical antiquity, and works by other foreign-born composers. A section on “material culture” lists paintings and sculptures of Gluck in Paris theaters and museums.As a “genealogy,” the book is a salutary reminder of the web of amateurs and professionals who discuss, promote, and perform works that others have created. Writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mme de Staël, and Hippolyte Taine held up Gluck as the embodiment of German music. Hector Berlioz wrote frequently and enthusiastically about Gluck, although he was less keen to program his music. The singers François Delsarte and Pauline Viardot aroused temporary interest in Gluck by regularly including his arias in their recitals. Musical anthologies for the bourgeois household included piano arrangements of his best-known arias. Some nineteenth-century adaptations of his works were scored for the military band.Genealogies of Music and Memory is musicology with very little music. Everist's reliance on networks of actors, agents, publishers, pedagogical practices, and archival environments leads him to assert that “multiple agency is endemic in the story told here.” Unfortunately, it is often unclear just what the story is. Carelessness in writing and editing throughout—including a subject-verb clash in the book's final sentence—has rendered key passages obscure. Everist describes Delsarte's voice as feeble, broken, veiled, and ready to be extinguished twice in the same paragraph, first as a paraphrase and again in a quotation (with a misplaced comma).Decentering artists and their work to elevate others responsible for its reception brings attention to the unseen and often unsung. In the absence of particular performance histories, musical analyses and description, or sustained accounts of shared tastes or critical responses, however, conclusions remain piecemeal. Everist claims to have revealed a “Geertzian web of culture” in his study. A more modest account would describe it as an enumeration of references, revivals, editions, excerpts, and arrangements. (shrink)

Social researchers have long known that playing music to people can evoke memories of their pasts and bring people into a different relationship with themselves as the sounds move them to make connections with an earlier period in their lives. It has been discovered in patients with dementia that it could revive people to hear songs they have loved, which can help to bring them back from a state of inner withdrawal. Some researchers have given people portable music listening devices (...) so that they can listen to music that evokes memories from particular moments that they might be willing to share as part of an oral history or ethnographic project. This is to invoke processes that we can acknowledge ourselves as we realize the very special relationship we seem to have with music from our teenage years ‐ processes that have helped to shape a generational experience and sensibility. Hearing old tracks from the past can move us to make connections and can invoke emotions and feelings in us that we might not have felt for years. It can restore memories of times past as we feel the presence of the past through the mediation of the sounds. This article explores the significance of sound and voice memory for traumatic suffering in the form of an autoethnographic study of Amy Berg’s documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015), transgenerational trauma, sexual trauma, feminism, therapy and the truths of memory. (shrink)

The psychological reality of an inner awareness built into conscious experience has traditionally been a central element of philosophy of consciousness, from Aristotle, to Descartes, Brentano, the phenomenological tradition, and early and contemporary analytic philosophy. Its existence, however, has recently been called into question, especially by defenders of so-called transparency of experience and first-order representationalists about phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I put forward a defense of inner awareness based on an argument from memory. Roughly, the idea is that (...) since we can only recall something if we were aware of it at the time of its occurrence, and since we can recall our own experiences, we must be aware of our own experiences at the time of their occurrence. The argument is far from new: it goes back to the Buddhist tradition and has been revived more recently in Buddhist Scholarship but also in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, in particular by Uriah Kriegel. However, I believe that, since it is the best extant argument for inner awareness, it deserves more extensive treatment. My goal is to strengthen the memory argument by making some conceptual distinctions as to the exact thesis about inner awareness that the argument is supposed to support, considering different ways the argument may be reconstructed depending on the exact thesis to be supported, and defending the argument from a new objection, raised very recently by Daniel Stoljar. (shrink)

In the BBC show, The Repair Shop, members of the public bring their cherished but crumbling possessions into a workshop populated by expert craftspeople, who carry out restorations. These objects arrive as treasured possessions, which, despite their dilapidated state, still hold memories and meaning for their owners, albeit memories that may have faded as the object itself has aged. Something magical seems to take place after the objects are restored, however. The restored objects seem to reanimate and revive the memories (...) that their owners have invested in them. How is it possible that this restoration can bring memories held by the objects back to life? What is special about The Repair Shop restoring objects to their former glory? We outline two ways in which objects can be evocative and embody emotion, memory, and meaning. We then outline the ways in which the restoration of these objects to something like their original form can improve scaffolded recall and bring memories back to life. For one class of evocative objects, the restoration enhances recall by reinstating details from the context in which the memories were encoded. For the second class of evocative objects, their restoration affords an imaginative connection to the past, which enables them to become powerful focal points of memory and shared narratives. In effect, The Repair Shop seems to work not only as a repair shop of objects but as a repair shop of memory too. (shrink)

The jubilee event took place on January 15 in Kyiv at the Department of Religious Studies. Several institutions - All-Ukrainian Society Prosvita, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, KamyanetsPodil National University named after. Ivan Ogienko - gathered a cohort of devoted scientists, ethnologists, journalists devoted to the gentian themes for the purpose of the solemn completion of the Ogievinki anniversary - the 130th anniversary of the birth of this glorious man and the 40th anniversary of her restoration. The birthday of (...) Ivan Ogienko, which falls on January 15, has been celebrated in Ukraine since the early 90's of the twentieth century, when the name of the prominent figure of the Ukrainian national movement was eliminated from the list of names that are not forbidden in Ukraine: Ogienko returned to his people, bursting in the ravings of reviving spiritual and religious processes. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show that consciousness entails self-consciousness by focusing on the relationship between consciousness and memory. More specifically, I addreess the following questions: (1) does consciousness require episodic memory?; and (2) does episodic memory require self-consciousness? With the aid of some Kantian considerations and recent empirical data, it is argued that consciousness does require episodic memory. This is done after defining episodic memory and distinguishing it from other types of (...) class='Hi'>memory. An affirmative answer to (2) is also warranted especially in the light of the issues raised in answering (1). I claim that 'consciousness entails self-consciousness' is thereby shown via the route through episodic memory, i.e. via affirmative answers to (1) and (2). My aim is to revive this Kantian thesis and to bring together current psychological research on amnesia with traditional philosophical perspectives on consciousness and memory. (shrink)

The subject of our article is the identification of cultural codes of Eastern European shtetl towns in the play by Grigory Gorin "Memorial Prayer", the libretto of which was written by the author based on the works of the famous Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. The author of the article describes the history and conditions of localization of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the peculiarities of its transformation, the tragic history of the Jewish theater in the first (...) third of the twentieth century. After the disappearance of the towns and the disuse of the Yiddish language, the preservation of the history of the characteristic everyday and philosophical way of life of the shtetls became the goal of museum figures, historians, writers, playwrights, and artists. In the work, using the example of Tevye the milkman, his family and environment, characteristic images of the inhabitants of small towns, their habitat, types of thinking and actions are revealed. The article uses the methods of historicism in the retrospective of the culture of Shtetl towns, the method of analysis in the identification of Shtetl archetypes, the method of synthesis in the generalization of a set of characteristic cultural codes. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. Eastern European Jewish shtetl towns are small urban-type settlements with a predominantly Jewish population, whose unique culture was determined by the Jewish faith, everyday and religious traditions, the Yiddish language, as well as the localization of residence in a small area. 2. During the period of large-scale social upheavals of the early twentieth century and the subsequent expansion beyond the boundaries of the towns, their unique culture became a mythologeme, the foundation for writers, artists, musicians, and theater figures who emerged from it. One of the milestones in the preservation of this culture was the Jewish theater GOSET, whose existence was tragically cut short in the middle of the twentieth century. 3. The play "Memorial Prayer", written by Grigory Gorin based on the works of Sholem Aleichem and staged at the Lenkom Theater by Mark Zakharov, became the quintessence of the characteristic images of the shtetl, and at the same time the revival of authentic Jewish culture. The author's special contribution is to highlight in the play the images-the archetypes of the Shtetl, which have become cultural markers, or codes of Jewish Yiddish culture. (shrink)

What is happening now in Ukraine is, in essence, the further implementation of the Stalinist plan to deprive Ukrainians of their historical memory, the continuation of the "Stalinist-Bolshevik" ethnocide. Not surprisingly, monuments began to appear in us as "the leader of the peoples", and the holiday of the Victory Day became a public holiday "the triumph of Stalin's ideas" and the Communist Party ideology "united and indivisible". Instead, dates such as the Day of Unity of Ukraine, the Day of (...) Remembrance of the Victims of Holodomor and political repressions are, to put it mildly, unpopular to the authorities. (shrink)

In the ancient chronicles we find interesting testimonies of the Cyril Monastery and the activities of prominent figures related to the history of this monastery. But notorious for Kyiv in 1240, this story ends in three long, hard ages. Among the experts do not abandon discussions on the most fundamental problems of this section of Ukrainian history. He seems to have fallen out of public memory: in the minds of our contemporaries, between Batu's invasion and Khmelnychchina, as a rule, (...) there is a clear emptiness, although events occurring in this period lacked neither drama, nor historical greatness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 168-172 [Access article in PDF] Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. Paolo Rossi. Trans. Stephen Clucas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xxviii + 333. $32.00 cloth. Of the traditional five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio—the most circuitous and fascinating history belongs to memoria. From its propulsion of Homeric lore to its grounding (...) of rhetorical invention to its exile under print culture to its recent revival in public memory studies, the promiscuous and perplexing history of memory in the West may be one of the least appreciated, and perhaps least understood, elements of rhetorical and intellectual history. The publication in 1966 of Frances Yates's highly praised The Art of Memory drew the attention of contemporary scholars to the importance of mnemotechnics to the culture of late medieval and early modern Europe. 1 Yates persuasively argued that the art of memory is an integral element of European intellectual history, one that can enrich our understanding of everything from Dominican theology to Shakespearian theater. However, six years earlier, in 1960, the Italian intellectual historian Paolo Rossi published in Italian an important precursor to Yates's work entitled Clavis Universalis: Arti Della Memoria e Logica Combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. The book traces the encyclopaedic and mnemotechnical traditions from Aristotle through Cicero and Raymond Lull and into the early-modern period, arguing that the art of memory provides an important antecedent to the advent of method in seventeenth-century philosophy, especially in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz. Yates, in her preface to The Art of Memory, acknowledges her debt to Rossi's work, and now this work has been made available in English translation. Stephen Clucas's translation, under the title Logic and the Art of Memory, will no doubt stimulate and supplement research into the mnemotechnical tradition in the English-speaking world, and perhaps lead us to reconsider the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric.Rossi argues that the neglect of the mnemotechnical tradition in its Ciceronian and Lullian strands has distorted our understanding of the "new" science and philosophy of the seventeenth-century, which is often interpreted as constituting, in a Kuhnian sense, a drastic paradigm shift from a [End Page 168] Renaissance worldview that still retained occult elements. Rossi places the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz within the historical strand of the logico-encyclopaedic and mnemotechnical traditions, suggesting that these figures culminate late medieval and early modern intellectual and cultural ambitions as much as they give rise to new ones. Rossi makes his argument by providing a history of mnemotechnics from Aristotle into the fifteenth century in chapter one; by examining the fascination with encyclopaedism, combinatoria, and memory in the sixteenth century in chapters two and three; by investigating the role of artificial memory in the works of key intellectual figures in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in chapters four through six; and by tracing the impulse toward universal knowledge and its connection to mnemotechnics among seventeenth-century Cartesians, Baconians, and in the work of Leibniz, in chapters seven and eight.Chapter one, after showing the pervasiveness of Renaissance mnemotechnical literature, surveys its classical and medieval antecedents in philosophy and rhetoric. Rossi argues that Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia, Cicero's De oratore, Quintilian's De institutione oratoria, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were each important to the mnemotechnical tradition into the seventeenth century. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century treatises on the ars memorativa and the ars predicandi, drawing on these classical and medieval theories, emphasize the importance of memory places (loci), images (imagines), and order or arrangement (dispositio) in mnemotechnics. Additionally, they intimately link the memory to the imagination, stressing the importance of exciting and stimulating the imagination in memorization. The Italian Pietro da Ravenna, for example, attributed the might of his memory to, in his own words, turning "the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places" (22). Such imaginative mnemonic techniques were considered to... (shrink)