The International Memory Reading Group
David Colaço (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) & Jonathan Najeson (Israel Institute of Technology/The Open University of Israel)
It can be hard to fathom just how many scholars, all over the world and all over the academic spectrum, are interested in memory. On one hand, this is a great situation. There no doubt remains much for us to learn about memory. Philosophy of memory has blossomed into a fruitful area of study because memory is a topic that has implications for a great number of disciplines (and subdisciplines of philosophy specifically). On the other hand, the number and diversity of articles and books, coming from a wide range of fields and disciplines, can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around.
For this reason, we started the International Memory Reading Group in 2021. Our motivation for the reading group arose from our interest in discussing works on memory with both scientists and philosophers, creating a hub for what can be called the new integrative turn in philosophy of memory. When we started, our desire was to make room for a place where recent controversies in memory from philosophical, historical, and scientific perspectives could be explored.
Central to our own research are questions about how we think about what memory is and what its “joints” are. What taxonomy of memory is most defensible, if any? Where does memory reside? Can memories be transferred or even implanted? What counts as a memory? We wanted to have a place for examining questions of this character.
The International Memory Reading Group is a monthly all-virtual reading group dedicated to recently accepted and published works on memory. While features of works-in-progress or ideas in development are valuable—we have held a work-in-progress session in the past—we want to feature accepted or published works for three reasons.
First, there are several venues where pre-submission works are regularly presented, but we could not find a venue for discussing recent works that are already through the submission process. We want our group to discuss and analyze these recent works.
Second, it is fair to offer constructive feedback to works-in-progress, but we do not want to focus on how works might be needled or even changed. Rather, we want to focus on how we as a community can respond to and build upon recent works.
Third, we want our group to serve as an up-to-date resource on what is new in the literature about memory. Not only does this benefit us and the other members of the group; it also allows us to get the word out and publicize these new additions to the literature. This last point is especially important to us, as we aim to be as inclusive as we can be when it comes to the topic (as long as it is about memory!) and background of the author. Beyond the fact that the two of us are in different time zones, this is why we meet virtually at as accommodating of an international time as possible (though we do apologize to our regular attendees from California).
Our reading group proves that we can transcend perceived intellectual boundaries by revealing mutual interests in memory. In our sessions, we have seen molecular neuroscientists incorporate phenomenology into their work, computationalists reflect on the necessity of biological insights about memory systems, and analytic philosophers inform their research programs with empirical insights from psychology. We discovered that, just like interpreting a good book, understanding the engram requires bringing together a diverse set of readers.
This productive integration proves, we wager, that there are many approaches one can take to studying memory, and we can all benefit from exploring these myriad approaches and the knowledge that is generated from them. One scientist, in fact, went out of their way to let us know how rewarding it was that their research was picked up and discussed by philosophers. We hope that our model and the successes that we have had can help others who aim to start reading groups.
The format of our group—a sort of author-meets-critics session—reflects our spirit of engagement. So far (at the time of writing, our next session will be our 20th), we have had the author of the work attend each session. Authors briefly present their work and their motivations for it, after which we open the floor for members to discuss these ideas with the author and attendees.
We have featured works from graduate students to full professors, and our group regularly comprises historians, philosophers, and scientists from four continents. Some of the topics we have covered recently include the role of memory in valuation (Biderman & Shohamy 2021), memory in artificial neural networks (Buckner 2024), remembering dreams (Werning & Liefke Forthcoming), and the biological basis of memory traces (O’Sullivan & Ryan Forthcoming). We welcome readers to visit here for a full list of the readings that we have featured at our past sessions.
Though our group is still growing, we have started to branch out into other philosophical venues and conferences. Discussions in the group were the basis for a symposium at the 2022 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. We aim to extend this success to other workshops and conferences in the future, but our principal aim is on the reading group itself.
Please take this blog post as an invitation to reach out to us about becoming an attendee at our reading group or having us feature your accepted, forthcoming, or recently published research. You can contact us via this form if you want to get on our mailing list or get in touch with us about new works. We are always excited to hear from scholars or learn about new works that might not otherwise be on our radar.
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