Abstract

From the Art of the Imagination to the Science of the Mind. Some Considerations on the Concept of Memory in Malebranche and Vico. The topic of the psychology of memory is rather marginal in the contemporary debate about the imagination in early modern philosophy, despite the evident fact that without memory imagining is impossible. This question moves from the rhetoric domain to the “scientific” analysis of the mind, and occurs both in Malebranche and Vico, but via different paths in each of the two thinkers: Vico studies the mythological thought, whereas Malebranche builds a new psychology and a new critique of the Aristotelian mentality, that is to say the mentality of every man who is not enlightened by divine grace and who has not read and understood Descartes. But they both share the rejection of the art of memory – which was the most thorough knowledge about memory until then – and more generally they formulate many congruent analyzes on the subject of memory.