ABSTRACT
Some philosophers and psychologists suggest that the episodic recollection of some past event or action that you have witnessed or performed is analogous to traveling back in time. It is a form of ‘mental time travel.’ But what sense can be made of the proposal that episodic recollection makes possible a form of mental time travel? This chapter argues that an answer to that question, is intimately bound up with the question of how we are to understand the role of imagery in episodic recollection. In particular, the chapter proposes that accommodating the idea that episodic recollection involves mental time travel requires making sense of the notion that the sensory aspects of episodic recollection are not tied to the recollecting subject’s actual present. The chapter explains and draws on connections between the notion that absence can be made present in perceptual imagination and the notion that the past can be made present in episodic recollection, and a proposal is made about the representation of time in perceptual imagination that is then applied in an account of the representation of time in episodic recollection. It is argued that this account accommodates the idea that the sensory aspects of episodic recollection are not tied to the recollecting subject’s actual present, which in turn accommodates the notion that episodic recollection amounts to a form a mental time travel.
