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Founded in 2018, the Centre for Philosophy of Memory is part of the Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble at the Université Grenoble Alpes. Members of the CPM publish research, organize meetings and seminars, edit books and special issues, edit a book series, host visitors, sponsor an early-career researcher essay prize, maintain bibliographical resources, and participate in local, national, and international networks.

As one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities, memory is a major area of research in disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience and brings together researchers from across the social and human sciences in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Philosophers of memory engage in intensive dialogue with their colleagues in other disciplines, but their primary focus is on employing the tools of analytic philosophy in order to answer a set of distinctively philosophical questions about memory. The most basic of these is also the most general: what is memory? Philosophers' attempts to formulate an adequate answer to this question have led them to propose a variety of epistemic, causal, and postcausal theories of memory.

The question of the nature of memory belongs to the philosophy of mind; other topics of current research that belong to this area include the the relationship between memory and imagination, the role of representation in remembering, the relationships among episodic, semantic, and other forms of memory, the nature of episodicity, the link between memory and the self, and the ontology of collective memory. While most philosophers approach memory from the perspective of the philosophy of mind, others approach it from the perspective of epistemology, dealing with puzzles such as the problem of forgotten evidence. Still others approach it from the perspective of ethics, asking questions about, for example, the normativity of memory modification and enhancement.

For introductions to the philosophy of memory, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1, 2], the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy, the Encyclopédie philosophique [1, 2], or Qu'est-ce que se souvenir ?. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory provides a detailed survey of the field, and New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory and Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory cover promising current issues, focusing on the philosophy of mind; for an introduction from an epistemological perspective, see A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory. The Oxford Bibliographies Online entry on memory provides pointers to some classic works, and the PhilPapers "memory" category includes additional work; PhilMemBib is a comprehensive, curated bibliography of philosophical research on memory.

The Issues in Philosophy of Memory 2 conference dinner at the Bastille above Grenoble.
Université Grenoble Alpes president Patrick Lévy opening the formal inauguration of the Centre for Philosophy of Memory. (Photo © Thierry Morturier/Dircom UGA.)