Memory & Attention

Claire Sergent spoke in the workshop organized by Gautier Anselin from Grenoble University.

​Background & Aims

Attention and memory seem deeply connected. But their relationships have not been systematically investigated in philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. To a large extent, philosophy of attention and philosophy of memory are still two separate fields of research. Usually, when philosophers of attention tackle the topic of memory, they take into account working memory (De Brigard & Prinz 2010, Prinz 2012). This type of approach has been extensively developed over the past decade. As for philosophers of memory, they almost make no room for attention in their accounts. While some give it some role in the epistemology of memory (Lackey 2005, Bernecker 2010), none have assigned it a substantial role in the ontology of episodic and semantic memory.
The workshop is intended to bring forward the topic and investigate new aspects of the relationships of attention and memory.

Potential topics

• the way attention carves up the episodes that form the objects of episodic memory. As empirical research has suggested with the Event Segmentation Theory, attention in short-term memory may play a major role for long-term encoding, a suggestion that has still to be discussed by the philosophy of memory.
• how attention contributes to episodic remembering, i.e., how attention is a structuring factor of both the content and the phenomenology of remembering.
• attention and practical memory, namely if attention is conceived of as a necessary part of action (Wu 2014), cognitive attending to one’s action can be conceived of as a “practical remembering” , keeping track of one’s intentional actions (Wu forthcoming), and maybe other links could be found between attention in action and procedural memory.

Speakers

Gautier Anselin (Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes)
Julian Bacharach (Centre for Philosophical Psychology, Antwerp University)
Felipe De Brigard (Duke University)
Carolyn Dicey Jennings (University of California, Merced)
Jérôme Dokic (EHESS/Institut Jean Nicod)
Anna Giustina (Université de Liège)
Christoph Hoerl (Warwick University)
Jonathan Mitchell (Cardiff University)
Denis Perrin (Centre for Philosophy of Memory, Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes)
André Sant’Anna (Cologne Centre for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition)
Claire Sergent (Université Paris Descartes)
Wayne Wu (Carnegie Mellon University)