ABSTRACT
Philosophical discussion of episodic memory and experiential imagining has in large part focused on their occurrent forms. The topic has been what it is for a subject to imagine something at a given moment, or what it is for the memory of some past episode to come to the subject at a particular time. But each of these mental phenomena also exhibits a non-occurrent aspect. The mental events on which attention has been focused are in each case actualizations of a potentiality or power. It is this side of memory and imagining that I explore.
Shifting focus in this way brings various rewards. It enables us to explain the relation between imaginings and rememberings undertaken deliberately and others that come to us unbidden. It opens the way to a promising solution to one of the thorniest problems concerning memory, that of distinguishing the ways in which present mental occurrences must relate to an earlier episode if the former are to count as memories of the latter. It offers new terms in which to frame the question of how remembering and imagining relate. And it suggests a novel perspective on how philosophical investigation of remembering and imagining relates to empirical research into the mechanisms that underlie them.
