What did Aquinas teach about memory?

[CrossofChrist]

What did St. Thomas have to say about why memory is reliable? Or any later Thomistic thinkers?

 

[adawgj]

I forget, I should have remembered what Aquinas taught about memory.

 

[LittleFlower378]

Check out article 6 & 7 of the link on the Summa. It gives a little about the memory, but there probably more somewhere. I forget if it was St.Bonaventure or Aquinas who talked about how it is easier to remember thongs when we link them to something.

newadvent.org/summa/1079.htm

 

[tm21]

Someone can correct me, but I believe Thomas taught that memory is a spiritual power (not biological). Therefore, in heaven we will have complete access to every memory of our earthly life.

 

[Bahman]

Memory is the reflection of past from the self into consciousness.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Memory is the reflection of past from the self into consciousness.

And what does that criptic statement mean? Give us an example or two.

Linus2nd

 

[Bahman]

And what does that criptic statement mean? Give us an example or two.

Linus2nd

First past does not exist and it can only be experienced at the moment now in consciousness. The past then is registered into the self after it is experienced and could be retrieved by a reflection.

What is consciousness? Consciousness is the ability to experience and affect mental states.
What is self? Self is set of mental states which were experienced.
What is reflection? Reflection is ability to differentiate what is experienced at now from what is experienced in past.
Why reflection is important? Because we experienced things unconditionally hence we have to have the ability to make distinction between what is there and what was there.

 

[John_Martin]

What did St. Thomas have to say about why memory is reliable? Or any later Thomistic thinkers?

I am not sure Aquinas would use the term “reliable” to mean that memory is always correct. But I believe he would say that it is not “varying”.

There are two types of memory to him, if you look at the link in LittleFlower’s post.

Active Type: In the soul (in the intellect), therefore not material, not the brain, there is the type of memory where you would “remember objects”, such as, “I have a friend named George, and we communicate with each other”. This is what I know, and it does not change (no variation), however, I may have been deceiving myself when I came to know it if George were a person who were tricking me to think he was my friend or if I only imagined conversations with him and pretended they were really happening (reliability of correctness)

Passive Type: In the composite person (the body with the brain’s neurons moved by the soul’s sensitive passions to be the passive intellect) there are memories of actual past events so that you have images of them in your physical thinking, such as if I “remember George’s voice and words in my head, again hearing what was said and perhaps seeing again in my mind what I saw then.” The neural connections are there, if strong enough, so there is not much variation, but again, we focus on and burn neural pathways, based upon conjectured value of an event, so the reliability of being reality may be questionable.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

First past does not exist and it can only be experienced at the moment now in consciousness. The past then is registered into the self after it is experienced and could be retrieved by a reflection.

What is consciousness? Consciousness is the ability to experience and affect mental states.
What is self? Self is set of mental states which were experienced.
What is reflection? Reflection is ability to differentiate what is experienced at now from what is experienced in past.
Why reflection is important? Because we experienced things unconditionally hence we have to have the ability to make distinction between what is there and what was there.

I agree that time is change and the past moment is gone and the future moment is not here but the things we experience at each of those moments still exists. It is only our moment by moment experience of them that changes. Yet we retain a memory of those experiences.

Consciousness is the momement realization that we are the same person we have always been and who has been experiencing all the things that we have experienced.

The self is " me, " the one who undergoes and is aware of all these mental, and physical, states.

Reflection is our ability to remember and think about all that we have experienced in the past and what we are experiencing now and what we might experience in the future.

But I don’t think Aquinas defined what memory was, Aristotle may have in his Treatise on the Soul. In the Summa Theologiae Thomas just talked about where the memory resided, whether in the intellect, as one of its powers, or in the senses. It seems that some kinds of memory resided in the intellect, while others resided in the senses - at least that is what I got out of it.

Linus2nd