Research Seminar 16.11.2026: Jonathan Najenson - Beyond the episodic: From multiple memory systems to remembering the personal past

Research Seminar

Monday, 16.11.2026, 16:15, Gilman 281

Jonathan Najenson, Cohn Institute

Beyond the episodic: From multiple memory systems to remembering the personal past

Philosophers routinely theorise about episodic memory and Remembering interchangeably, drawing inferences from empirical findings about episodic memory to claims about Remembering. This paper argues that such inferences are often too quick, overlooking that Remembering is an epistemically blurry object whose constituent phenomena remain unsettled. We first explain that Remembering, the capacity to remember events, objects, and places from one’s personal past, depends on multiple cognitive systems and is not reducible to episodic memory. We then marshal behavioural and neurophysiological evidence to demonstrate that object – and place – oriented forms of Remembering can occur without episodic memory, and conversely, that episodic memory can remain intact while specific Remembering capacities are impaired. Such dissociations expose the limits of treating this explanatory construct as fixing the boundaries of the research object, challenging the claim that episodic memory exhausts Remembering.

Gathering for coffee and refreshments at 16:00

Chair: Ehud Lamm

The public is invited