Introduction to social mnemology: the scientific base ; The ontology of human memory ; The semantics of social memory ; The cognitive aspect of social memory ; The praxiological aspect of social memory ; Social memory as communication ; Social memory as a factor of modernization.

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality.

Public debates over the last two decades about social memories, about how as societies we remember, make sense of, and even imagine and invent, our collective pasts suggest that grand narratives have been abandoned for numerous little stories that contest the unified visions of the past. But, while focusing on the diversity of social remembering, these fragmentary accounts have also revealed the fault-lines within the theoretical terrain of memory studies. This critical anthology seeks to bridge these rifts and breaks within the contemporary theoretical landscape by addressing the pressing issues of social differentiation and forgetting as also the relatively unexplored futuristic aspect of social memories. Arranged in four thematic sections which focus on the concepts, temporalities, functions and contexts of social memories, this book includes essays that range across disciplines and present a variety of theoretical approaches, from phenomenological sociology and systems theory to biography research and post-colonialism.

The book offers a fundamental view on the problem of forgetting in sociology in general and within sociology of knowledge. Furthermore it focuses - as a case study - on the field of modern science. With recourse to the term 'oblivionism', originally introduced with ironic-critical intent by the german romance scholar Harald Weinrich, it analyzes the fundamental and multifaceted problem of the loss of knowledge in the field of science. A declarative-reflective, an incorporated-practical and an objectified-technical memory motif is at the centre. These form the basis for the development of the three forms of forgetting that are also central to modern science: forgetfulness, wanting to forget and, ultimately, making one forget.

This book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic.

This book stems from the seminal work of Robert Venturi and aims at re-projecting it in the current cultural debate by extending it to the scale of landscape and placing it in connection with representative issues. It brings out the transdisciplinary synthesis of a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to the theme, aimed at creating new models which are able to represent the complexity of a contradictory reality and to redefine the centrality of human dimension. As such, the volume gathers multiple experiences developed in different geographical areas, which come into connection with the role of representation. Composed of 43 chapters written by 81 authors from around the world, with an introduction by Jim Venturi and Cezar Nicolescu, the volume is divided into two parts, the first one more theoretical and the other one which showcases real-world applications, although there is never a total split between criticism and operational experimentation of research.

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field.