Two treatises on memory which have come down to us from antiquity are Aristotle's On memory and
recollection and Plotinus' On perception and memory (IV 6) the latter also wrote at length
about memory in his Problems connected with the soul (IV 3-4 esp. 3.25-4.6). In both authors
memory is treated as a 'modest' faculty: both authors assume the existence of a persistent
subject to whom memory belongs and basic cognitive capacities are assumed on which memory
depends. In particular both theories use phantasia (representation) to explain
memory.Aristotle takes representations to be changes in concrete living things which arise from
actual perception. To be connected to the original perception the representation has to be
taken as a (kind of) copy of the original experience this is the way Aristotle defines memory
at the end of his investigation.Plotinus does not define memory: he is concerned with the
question of what remembers. This is of course the soul which goes through different stages of
incarnation and disincarnation. Since the disembodied soul can remember so he does not have
Aristotle's resources for explaining the continued presence of representations as changes in
the concrete thing. Instead he thinks that when acquiring a memory we acquire a capacity in
respect of the object of the memory namely to make it present at a later time.
