CommonKnowledge

O\u27Loughlin, Ian

Res Cogitans 
Volume 9 Issue 1 Article 1 
2018 
Issue Introduction 
Ian O'Loughlin 
Pacific University, ian.oloughlin@pacificu.edu 
Recommended Citation 
O'Loughlin, Ian (2018) "Issue Introduction," Res Cogitans: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 1. https://doi.org/10.7710/
2155-4838.1181 
This Issue Introduction is brought to you for free and open access by CommonKnowledge. It has been accepted for 
inclusion in Res Cogitans by an authorized editor of CommonKnowledge. For more information, please contact 
CommonKnowledge@pacificu.edu. 
© 2018 O’Loughlin. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License 
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
ISSN 2155-4838 | Res Cogitans is published by the Pacific University Libraries
Issue Introduction
Volume 9, Issue 1 (2018)
Res Cogitans
The papers included here were all presented in April 2018 at the 22nd  annual Pacific University 
Undergraduate Conference. (For the full conference program.1 Over the years the conference has hosted 
more than 1500 students, coming from over 300 different schools, representing all fifty U.S. states and 
several other countries. Of the nearly ninety presentations at the 2018 conference, the papers below, 
because of their impressive quality, were selected for publication in this issue. They demonstrate the 
remarkably fine scholarship of the best of those students whose papers were accepted for presentation.
This conference is a general one every year, meaning that papers in all areas of philosophy are 
presented. The papers in this issue span ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, 
aesthetics, epistemology, social/political philosophy, metaphysics, history of philosophy, and more. 
They represent and exemplify the substantive and sophisticated work of the undergraduate students 
who participated in the conference.
1 For the full conference program, see http://www.pacificu.edu/current-undergraduate/academics/
majorsminors/ philosophy/undergraduate-philosophy-conference/full-conference-schedule.
Ian O’Loughlin
Pacific University
ian.oloughlin@pacificu.edu
https://doi.org/10.7710/2155-4838.1181


English

Issue Introduction

Lusk, Elena

Attitude Matters: The Inadequacy of Consequentialist Ethical Practice

OLA Quarterly 
Volume 24 
Number 1 The Specialness of Special Libraries 
7-25-2018 
Volume 24 Issue 1 Back Matter 
Recommended Citation 
(2018). Volume 24 Issue 1 Back Matter. OLA Quarterly, 24(1), 45-45. https://doi.org/10.7710/
1093-7374.1935 
© 2018 by the author(s). 
OLA Quarterly is an official publication of the Oregon Library Association | ISSN 1093-7374 
 45
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OLA Quarterly Publication Schedule 2018
Pub. Date Guest EditorTheme DeadlineVol./No.
Lots of Ways  
to Be a Leader
Jane Scheppke
Crook County Library
Vol 24 • No. 2 
Summer 2018
The OLA Communications Committee
June 1, 2018 August 15, 2018
OLA Communications Committee Chair  
& OLA Quarterly Coordinator
Charles Wood
OLA Hotline Co-Editor
Sarah Imholt
Oregon State University
OLA Hotline Co-Editor
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St. Helens Public Library
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Oregon State University
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Crook County Library
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Jenn Weston
Pioneer Pacific College
Association Manager
Shirley Roberts


Volume 24 Issue 1 Back Matter

This article examines college student attitudes towards social policy by linking how millennials define poverty and welfare to their beliefs about redistribution and policy changes. Using a mixed methodology, we develop a theory to explain why students often use structural definitions of poverty and social policy coupled with a reliance on individualistic solutions for individuals saddled with poverty or in need of social assistance. 450 surveys and 10 interviews were conducted to examine attitudes toward poverty, welfare policy, and people receiving welfare. The results, while not generalizable, shed light on how millennials think about the link between poverty and welfare

Watson, Jamesha E

Pederson, JoEllen

The Rise of Structural Individualism: Millennial Attitudes toward Welfare and Poverty

Robins, Sarah

© 2018 O’Loughlin & Robins This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 
License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
ISSN 1526-0569 | Essays in Philosophy is published by the Pacific University Libraries
The Philosophy of Memory: 
Introduction
Volume 19, Issue 2 (2018)
Ian O’Loughlin 
Pacific University
Sarah K. Robins 
University of Kansas
Essays Philos (2018)19:2  |  DOI:  10.7710/1526-0569.1608
Correspondence:  ian.oloughlin@pacificu.edu;  skrobins@ku.edu
Essays in Philosophy
As a pervasive and fundamental feature of human experience, memory has long provided 
fertile ground for philosophical work. Memory appears in a wide and disparate range of 
philosophical projects and traditions—from the writings of Plato and Aristotle in Ancient 
Greece to the work of early Buddhist philosophers like Śabara and Buddhaghosa, from 
epistemological questions about the retention of knowledge, to metaphysical debates 
about the nature of personal identity, to phenomenological inquiries into our experience 
of time and history. As a primary mental capacity, memory has played a particularly 
important role in the work of philosophers interested in minds and cognition, especially 
as interdisciplinary cognitive science has developed over the last several decades. The 
extensive points of contact between memory and philosophy are not surprising: interest 
in memory arises nearly any time a concept, ability, or entity needs to be extended and 
retained, as in investigations of persons, time, knowledge, the self, and experience. 
Whenever we are doing philosophy, memory is not far.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this wide-reaching character, the philosophy of memory 
as a focused area of inquiry in philosophy has been a relative latecomer. The comparison 
Volume 19, Issue 2Essays in Philosophy
2 | eP1608 Essays in Philosophy
to perception is illustrative: memory and perception are arguably comparable in their 
centrality to human cognition and experience, and yet contemporary work in the 
philosophy of perception outstrips that in the philosophy of memory by at least an order 
of magnitude. In recent years, this has begun to change, as a collection of work devoted 
to the philosophy of memory has begun to emerge. This work draws on a diverse array of 
sources—empirical, conceptual, and literary, from both inside and outside philosophy—
and makes use of a number of varying frameworks in order to approach memory 
philosophically. It is our hope that the present volume will contribute to this ongoing 
development.
In keeping with the diversity of these approaches, we have solicited and received a 
collection of essays that reflect the wide range of ways in which memory is interrogated 
philosophically. These essays each take different facets of memory as their respective 
targets and discuss memory within distinctive research traditions. Presenting them 
alongside one another, we hope, generates new insights. Given especially the nascent 
stage at which the philosophy of memory finds itself, there is reason to believe that this 
volume’s pluralism will help to both refine basic concepts and prompt new questions. 
The first essay, Nikola Andonovski’s “Is Episodic Memory a Natural Kind?,” lies at the 
intersection of the memory taxonomies of psychology and natural kind literatures in 
philosophy of science. Memory taxonomies remain controversial (as do natural kinds), 
and Andonovski takes up this controversy by responding to an argument from Cheng 
and Werning (2016) that presented episodic memory—our memory for episodes from 
our personal past—as a natural kind, borrowing the homeostatic property cluster view 
of natural kinds. Indeed, it is the very controversy of memory taxonomy itself that 
Andonovski makes use of here, arguing that the characterization from Cheng and 
Werning misses a key and needed feature of these natural kinds: the ability to arbitrate 
between competing taxonomies. If we are to carve the nature of memory at its joints, 
argues Andonovski, it cannot be carved thus.
In the second essay, “Learning and Vision: Johann Gottfried Herder on Memory,” Laura 
Follesa investigates the treatment of memory by German Enlightenment thinker Johann 
Gottfried Herder.  According to Follesa, it is by Herder’s specific characterization of 
the workings of memory, and especially memory images, that he seeks to synthesize 
Plato’s approach to knowledge and the presuppositions of eighteenth-century 
German philosophy and his contemporaries. Herder uses our recollection of images, 
ongoing since childhood, in order to retain the structure of Platonic recollection, 
and to transmute this structure from a metaphysical one to a psychological one. In 
addition, Follesa presents parallels in Herder’s thought between the childhood of an 
individual—and the resultant associated memory—and the infancy of humankind. 
O’Loughlin & Robins | Introduction
 commons.pacificu.edu/eip eP1608 | 3
Arieh Schwartz’s essay, “Memory and Disjunctivism,”—the third essay in the volume—
highlights an important and previously underappreciated difficulty in contemporary 
accounts of remembering. Many contemporary philosophers of memory take it as an 
explicit desideratum that a theory of remembering should provide a way to distinguish 
genuine remembering from the forms of memory error well-documented in recent 
memory science. The aim is to provide a descriptively adequate theory of remembering. 
In an effort to distinguish remembering from similar mental states, many philosophers 
have recently proposed taxonomies of memory errors. These accounts (e.g., Cheng and 
Werning 2016; Robins 2016; Michaelian 2016; and Bernecker 2017) do so by appeal 
to an accuracy condition. Remembering and misremembering, for example, might feel 
the same to the person undergoing each, but they are distinct states because the former 
is accurate while the latter is not. Schwartz argues that framing the distinction in this 
way results in a commitment to disjunctivism about seeming to remember. Schwartz 
then shows that this form of disjunctivism conflicts with another commitment that is 
important for empirically sensitive philosophers of memory: psychological internalism. 
What is the function of autobiographical memory? Carlos Montemayor pursues this 
question in “Consciousness and Memory: A Transactional Approach,” the fourth 
essay in the volume. Montemayor offers a transactional account of autobiographical 
memory, pushing back on standard, epistemic accounts of memory function. To call 
autobiographical memory transactive is to acknowledge the role that moral concerns 
play in forming and evaluating these memories, which concern our selection of 
which memories to retain as central to ourselves and our projects and which to 
forget. This account requires a distinction between the role and nature of episodic and 
autobiographical memory. Montemayor argues that the critical features and functions 
of autobiographical memory resist reduction to the epistemic constraints of episodic 
memory. Autobiographical memories play an important, narrative-forming and self-
identity-sustaining role in our lives, and so must be considered distinctly. Montemayor’s 
dual-function view allows autobiographical memory to be transactional, while episodic 
memory remains epistemic. 
The fifth essay, César Schirmer dos Santos’s “Episodic Memory, the Cotemporality 
Problem, and Common Sense,” addresses the cotemporality problem, which is an 
issue with our basic picture of memory. Although the objects of our memory seem to 
be past events, these past events are by their very nature no longer present. Anyone 
who hopes to talk of memory’s contact with the past must overcome this apparent 
mismatch. Schirmer dos Santos defends Bernecker’s (2008) eternalist solution 
against critics, demonstrating reasons why we should hesitate before condemning 
the impracticality of positing the continued existence of nonoccurrent past events. 
 
Volume 19, Issue 2Essays in Philosophy
4 | eP1608 Essays in Philosophy
The sixth essay is André Bilbrough’s “Memory and the True Self: When Moral Knowledge 
Can and Cannot be Forgotten.” Bilbrough considers the ways in which forgetting 
influences particular knowledge domains distinctly. He focuses on moral knowledge, 
which many have argued cannot be forgotten, on grounds of absurdity—once one learns 
of the wrongness of murder, theft, assault, and the like, one cannot simply forget this 
information (even if one goes on to engage in such wrongful acts). Bilbrough reviews 
work on this issue by Ryle (1958), McGrath (2015), and Bugeja (2016) and complicates 
the standard picture by introducing work in contemporary moral psychology and 
empirical philosophy. Work in these latter traditions allows for a range of distinctions 
between certain forms of moral knowledge and decision-making, which rely on distinct 
cognitive systems and bear different relations to the would-be-rememberer’s identity. 
These distinctions allow Bilbrough to identify a set of circumstances in which, he argues, 
some moral knowledge can be forgotten. 
In the last essay, “Doing Justice to the Past: Memory and Criticism in Herbert Marcuse,” 
Laura Arese illustrates, via Marcuse, more and detailed parallels between memory and 
history. Arese argues that memory is a uniting theme across disparate threads in the work 
of Marcuse, and that understanding it as such allows new insights into the development 
of Marcuse’s thought. For Marcuse, argues Arese, memory works in tandem with 
imagination to allow us to deconstruct the present by means of the past, both as persons 
and as cultures. Specifically, Marcuse is also interested in our memory—individual and 
collective—of both happiness lost and limits encountered, each of which makes possible 
our continuing imaginings and explorations of the present and future.


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Issue Introduction

Attitude Matters: The Inadequacy of Consequentialist Ethical Practice

Volume 24 Issue 1 Back Matter

The Rise of Structural Individualism: Millennial Attitudes toward Welfare and Poverty

Issue Introduction

Memory and Disjunctivism

At the Coffee Shop (poem)

The Parasite of Desire (short story)

The Jar & Its Contents (short story)

Short Story Collection Story (short story)

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