ABSTRACT
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to Descartes’ recognition of two distinct kinds of memory.1 One of these is corporeal, or has at least a corporeal basis, whereas the other is intellectual and ‘purely spiritual’, and is, as such, not found in animals. Corporeal memory is already discussed extensively in the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, roughly datable to 1628/292; but the doctrine of intellectual memory appears to be closely connected with issues raised in the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia of 1641 and is discussed mostly in Descartes’ correspondence of 1640-8.
