Speaker Series: Muhammad Ali Khalidi “Episodic Memory and Joint Agency”

Content

This paper has two aims: first, to defend the claim that episodic memory is a distinct psychological capacity, and second, to propose a possible evolutionary function for this capacity. On the first score, I use two inferences to the best explanation to argue that it is likely that there is a human psychological capacity whose function it is to represent past experiences. To satisfy the second aim, I propose a distinct evolutionary function for the capacity of episodic memory, having to do with motivating prosocial behavior.

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He specializes in general issues in the philosophy of science, as well as questions in the foundations of the special sciences, especially cognitive science and social science. His most recent books include, Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences, which was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press, and Natural Kinds, for the Cambridge Elements series, also published in 2023. He has additional research interests in the history of Arabic-Islamic philosophy and has published a translated anthology of Arabic philosophical texts, Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings (Cambridge, 2005).