Memory and the feeling of pastness

Recent accounts of episodic memory have revived some ideas familiar from the ‘empiricist theory of memory’, which go back at least as far as Hume. New versions of the empiricist theory cite two separate bodies of recent research in psychology in support of thinking of episodic memory along empiricist lines: One is taken to demonstrate the existence of an imagistic ingredient that remembering shares, e.g., with episodic future thinking or sensory imagining; the other that of an affective ingredient (e.g., a ‘feeling of pastness’) that distinguishes remembering from these other cognitive activities. I will provide a sketch of the empiricist theory, taking Russell’s account of memory in The Analysis of Mind as my guide. I will then offer some reasons for thinking that new versions of it found in the current literature on episodic memory are subject to much the same criticisms as their more traditional predecessors.