A Philosophical Happy Hour on the nature, operations, and training of the memory.
“This invention [of writing]”, says the Egyptian King Thamus, in Plato’s Phaedrus, “will produce forgetfulness in the souls who have learned it.” It perhaps shocks us, slightly at least, to read this condemnation of writing. But let us consider the rest of what King Thamus has to say: “They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves.”[1]
In the days of smartphones and Google calendar, Alexa and Siri, the Internet of Things, and a rapidly proliferating number of “Artificially Intelligent” assistants and agents to track and schedule every detail of our admittedly over-complex lives, a worry about writing’s damage to memory may seem quaint. But Thamus’ point commands our attention regardless. Do we undermine our memory by the use of external stimuli? What is the memory, in fact? What does it do and how does it do it? Can it be trained or is it purely innate, purely biological?
These questions are not easy to answer. Certainly, we will not answer them sufficiently in the span of a single Happy Hour. But we can make some in-roads nonetheless—and we should. Memory’s importance has often been undermined in the modern age. Antiquity saw it differently. As Mary Carruthers writes in her Book of Memory:[2]
Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect.
Allow us to highlight a few points for guiding the discussion.
The Faculty of Memory
First, the classical development of memory in the Western world encompasses a plurality of different but often closely interrelated traditions. Two that stand out are that of the rhetoricians, for whom memory and its training form a key component of oratory’s performance; and that of the faculty psychology developed by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. In particular, Aristotle, in his On the Soul but especially in the minor work, On Memory and Recollection, provides a causal and structural outline for memory as a distinct faculty of the “interior senses” or “perceptual faculties”, as we might call them. Key to this outline is that the memory creates certain habitual retentions not of particular data—like a computer—but of patterned relations including the qualitative experience of being the one to have some experience. Another way of putting this: memory retains motions in the soul.
Thomas Aquinas, famed himself for having one of the most capacious memories in human history, built upon this outline through not only his commentaries on Aristotle but his own voluminous texts. Among the points taken from Aristotle and further clarified is the distinction between remembering and recollecting as different operations of the memorative faculty. To remember is to hold the thing sought. To recollect is to rediscover the motions within oneself by which it is found. While many animals have memory and an act of remembering, only human beings have recollection.
These distinctions might foster some interesting questions and discussion!
Training our Memorative Functions
Second, we find many today speaking of memorative capacity as though a wholly innate and determined talent, rather than a skill that may be trained and developed. Others may reduce it strictly to a biological or neurological disposition. Truly, some are gifted with a great memorative capacity.
But education in the ancient world emphasized heavily the training of memory—not only for pragmatic or utilitarian purposes, but precisely as a matter of character. Indeed, memory was often considered an integral part of the virtue of prudence. Thus, many techniques were proposed, developed, and employed for training the memory.
Perhaps we ought, today, to retrieve and integrate some of these techniques—not as mere instruments, but as integral parts of our development as human beings. Certainly, we see the forgetfulness of the human soul everywhere we look, today. We see cognitive inconsistency ruling the lives of many. But does this need to be the case?
…What were we talking about?
Join us this Wednesday (18 June 2025 from 5:45–7:15+ PM ET) to talk about… the things, uh, you know… those things we were just discussing… memory! What it is, what it does, and how we can train it to do those things better.
philosophical happy hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
[1] Plato i.360-70bc: Φαῖδρος, 275a.
[2] Carruthers 2008: The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition, 1.
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