Robert Hopkins: The singular character of episodic memory

Tuesday June 24 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Episodic memory and experiential imagining each present two faces. As mental occurrences, they are dated episodes with phenomenal character. However, those occurrences are actualizations of mental powers: capacities or abilities to call the remembered episode to mind, or to picture to oneself the imagined scene. There are of course many differences between imagining and remembering. Here I concentrate on two. The first is that occurrent memories always have a kind of content—object-dependent, de re content—-that occurrent imaginings never have. The second is that imaginative powers are inherently general, whereas powers to remember are individuated by reference to particular past episodes. Both represent ways in which memory is directed at particulars, as imagining is not. My goal will be to explore how these two contrast relate. Is one more fundamental than the other, or can both be traced to a common source? I will then use the answer to examine a different kind of experiential memory, generic memory, such as memories for family outings to the seaside in one’s youth. Does generic memory, in occurrent form or as the power those occurrences actualize, exhibit anything parallel to the particular-directedness of episodic memory? And what does the answer imply for how akin the two phenomena should be taken to be?

Bio
Robert Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at NYU. He specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of representation, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of “The profile of imagination” (OUP) and “Picture, Image and Experience” (CUP). He has written extensively on topics such as pictorial representation, picture perception, and the aesthetics of various art forms, including sculpture, photography, painting, and film. Hopkins is also interested in the epistemology and metaphysical status of aesthetic and moral judgments. His work has been published in prominent journals like Mind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Nous.

Before joining NYU, Hopkins taught at the University of Sheffield and the University of Birmingham. He has served as Honorary Secretary of the Mind Association, President of the European Society for Aesthetics, and a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics. In 2014-5, he led a research project funded by the Templeton Foundation, exploring the relationship between historical and aesthetic understanding. Hopkins has also been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize.