IDEX Rayonnement International (2025-2027) : Investigating the dispositional nature of episodic memory

L’appel à projets Initiatives d’Excellence – Rayonnement International (IDEX-RI) soutient des projets visant à financer des thèses ou post-doctorats impliquant une collaboration de l'UGA avec un partenaire international.

 

The project

DISMEM is a project in the philosophy of memory on the topic of the dispositional nature of this form of memory. Two constitutive aspects of episodic memory—namely the episodic memory trace and the episodic memory state—can indeed be characterized as dispositional realities, with the trace being a disposition to reactivate a certain neural pattern and the state being something that can exist in a non-actual form and be actualized were appropriate circumstances to occur. Surprisingly, despite the importance of this ontological aspect of episodic memory, to date it has triggered no investigation whatsoever. This is all the more surprising that another area—the philosophy of dispositions developed in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science—offers robust resources to carry out such an investigation. For the first time, DISMEM will precisely use these resources to explore and account for the dispositional reality of the episodic memory trace and the episodic memory state.