ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two philosophers—John Locke and Thomas Reid—whose theories of memory and the role it plays in our lives are very different from these common assumptions about memory. Locke presents remembering as an activity that may be, but need not be, about the past. Like Locke, Reid holds that remembering renews acquaintance with things already apprehended. Both Reid and Locke see remembering as releasing us from a persistent specious present that would keep the world always new, yet leave it always alien. Locke, using a common distinction, divides the human mind's powers into thinking and volition. Locke identifies three broad types of memory. These are remembrance—which includes recollection, contemplation, reverie, attention, study, dreaming, and ecstasy; retention, and, most controversially, consciousness of past actions and thoughts. According to Reid, remembering preserves past apprehension of events to which we were agent or witness.
