The Department of Philosophy is pleased to welcome Associate Professor of Philosophy Sarah Robins (University of Kansas) as the 2022 speaker in the Department of Philosophy Distinguished Lecture Series. Dr. Robins will deliver two talks, which are free and open of the public, on the afternoons of April 7th and 8th.
The Memory Trace in Philosophy and Neuroscience will be an academic lecture taking place Thursday, April 7th, 3:30-5:00pm, in RSC 142 (Harvest Room).
Why Philosophy Matters for the Mind-Brain Sciences will be a general-audiences lecture taking place Friday, April 8th, 3:30-5:00pm, in Clinton Hall 200.
FOR STUDENTS: Sarah Robins will also hold a seminar for students only on Friday April 8, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM in Clinton Hall 200 on "Moral Motivation and Behavior" (Write to susan.sterrett@wichita.edu for the suggested reading and details)
Here an abstract for Dr. Robin's April 7th talk, "The Memory Trace in Philosophy and Neuroscience":
Memory traces are a persistent yet puzzling feature of our thinking about memory. They have been a part of theorizing about memory for as long as there has been theorizing about memory. But they’re also mysterious. The primary way of ‘making sense’ of them is via metaphors—traces are likened to birds in aviaries, impressions in wax, items in a warehouse, or grooves in a record.
As philosophy of memory has grown recently into an active subfield, many working in this area consider traces an unnecessary and outdated idea. Meanwhile, memory researchers in neurobiology proclaim that we are in the midst of “engram renaissance” (Josselyn, Köhler, & Frankland, 2017). Engram is a new word for an old idea, the current scientific term for the memory trace. New tools like optogenetics have produced a number of discoveries, exciting not only for what they reveal about the basic mechanisms of memory, but for the opportunities they provide to connect with broader areas of memory science.
What are memory traces, and do we need them? The memory trace (or engram) remains woefully undertheorized—a neglect that persists even as the philosophy of memory expands. In this talk, I sketch a way to address this, developing a theory of the engram/trace that captures work in contemporary neurobiology and conveys its significance for our theorizing about memory more broadly. The account also serves to appropriately situate the neurobiology of memory as a central contributor in the interdisciplinary inquiry into memory, and as an area of memory science worth the attention of philosophers of memory.