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This philosophical study of memory makes abundantly evident the complexity of the subject. The author accepts the importance of psychological studies of memory but considers them unnecessary for his argument. Whether the manifestations of memory lend themselves to philosophical abstraction, as mathematical symbols do, may, however, be doubted. As a psychoanalytically-oriented reader, I find myself dissatisfied with von Leyden's limited approach.
Essentially, the book is a critique of two conflicting philosophical theories of memory, that of Bertrand Russell, which is called the 'empiricist' or 'present approach', and that of Gilbert Ryle, which is called the 'past approach'. Von Leyden attempts to search out the truth in each theory with, however, preference for the former. According to him, Ryle considers the important sense of the word '"remembering" [as] having learned something and not forgotten it', whereas Russell makes the point that 'everything constituting a memory belief is happening now, not in the past to which the belief is taken to refer'. The belief in the existence of the past can only be an assumption that can neither be proved nor disproved. But, adds Russell, it is psychologically impossible to doubt the reality of the past. The assumption that memory is generally trustworthy, though fallible, makes remembering a source and a premise of knowledge.
Von Leyden objects to Ryle's formulation because it makes memory genuine or veridical and thus necessarily infallible; what is false or uncertain is not memory. He believes, and the psychoanalyst will agree, 'that there are totally delusive memory experiences and that there does not seem to be any intrinsic or qualitative difference between these and genuine memories'.
The problem raised is not different from that which concerns the psychoanalyst: 'The question at issue is how I can know that my or anyone else's present memory experience of a past event is in fact a