On Autobiographical Memory
Author: Anita Kasabova
Date Of Publication: Jan 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0110-2
Isbn: 1-4438-0110-0
The aim of this book is to provide an account of autobiographical memory, the memory of episodes in the subject’s autobiography and to answer the following questions: what happens when we remember something? Why do we remember some things rather than others? The main assumptions in this book are that autobiographical memory is an active structure of a representational nature and that autobiographical memory is a construct of the imagination enabled by a semantic principle: the ground-consequence relation. Anita Kasabova reconstructs the epistemological accounts of memory by the Prague philosopher and mathematician, Bernard Bolzano and the Prague physiologist Ewald Hering as well as the phenomenological accounts by Edmund Husserl and Roman Ingarden, and discusses various accounts put forward within analytic philosophy. She examines the trace theory and its relation to the phenomenology of autobiographical memory and the different temporal perspectives that characterize this form of memory.

Kasabova formulates a philosophical explication of how autobiographical memory works, dealing with issues such as: ‘what are the defining features of autobiographical memory?’; ‘how is it structured and how does it function?’; ‘what is a recollection and what are the necessary and (for the most part) sufficient conditions for a recollection to occur?’ Kasabova argues that such conditions are a sense of self and a sense of connectedness of the self that is semantic rather than causal, the subject’s sense of ownership of past experiences and the capacity of imagination: for mental time travel and thinking about past episodes, you have to be able to produce representations not bound to the current situation. It is argued that access to the subject’s personal past cannot occur otherwise than by construction in imagination. In order to reproduce a past experience in the present, imagination is necessary for representing a past episode as if it were present. Other necessary conditions for autobiographical memory are time-awareness, a continuous temporal reference frame, a successive temporal order and the capacity to refer back to previous positions in time. Finally, semantic relations of part-whole and ground-consequence are crucial for explaining autobiographical memory. It is argued that the part-whole relation is the principle of the memory trace and that the grounding relation co-ordinates the subject’s perspective on past episodes in recollective statements. Kasabova argues that autobiographical memory is basically semantic, as it is grounded by and constructed through a ‘sense-making’ relation expressed by the explanatory conjunct ‘because’: we recall certain experiences or actions rather than other because we are sensitive to the reasons for having experienced it.

"The new book by Anita Kasabova fills a gap between traditional philosophical “armchair” speculations about memory and contemporary cognitive theories, which have grown out of extensive experimental research.

The book’s main idea that autobiographical memory is not a mere recollection but rather an active reconstruction of our past memories is not an entirely new one. Anita Kasabova, however, provides a new take on this idea by revealing that the theories of Bolzano, Hering, and Husserl not only bear historical significance but, properly reconstructed, they might be viewed as an important contribution to the contemporary interdisciplinary studies of memory.

An appreciable achievement of the book is the chosen conceptual framework: it makes the idiosyncratic language of Bolzano and Husserl accessible to contemporary cognitive scientists as well as making the recent cognitive theories understandable for the traditional philosophical scholars. Even if this were the only achievement of Anita Kasabova (and it is not) it would represent her monograph as a book of a great merit for a large community of memory scholars."

—Assoc. Prof. Lilia Gurova, Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology, New Bulgarian University

Anita Kasabova is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the New Bulgarian University. Educated at Geneva University (BA, MA, MPHil, DPHil), she has published papers in journals such as Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly and History and Theory.

“Anita Kasabova’s book is the first systematic analytical study on this topic. Her main thesis is that autobiographical memory is the awareness of one’s past experiences as a result of an act of recollection. The arguments she presents are compelling, thus belonging to the best analytical tradition. Moreover, they are nicely accompanied by rich phenomenological descriptions. I highly recommend this book not only to philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and their students, but also to literary critics working on autobiography.”

Clotilde Calabi, Associate Professor of Theories of Language and Mind, Philosophy Department, Università degli Studi di Milano

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