Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. In particular, personal memory—the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it—often has intense emotional or moral significance: It is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of humans' limited but genuine freedom from their present environment and immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self.

The philosophy of memory is a fascinating, diverse, and underdeveloped area of study, which offers difficult but rewarding connections not only with psychology and the cognitive sciences, but also with the social sciences and political theory, and with literature and the arts. Outside philosophy, interest in memory increased massively and disproportionately...