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A Singular and Representative Life: Personal Memory and Systematic Harms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Philosophers have regarded memory of the events of one's own past, which I will call experiential memory, as importantly personal and have written with conviction about the value of personal memory. Annette Baier writes: “Out of a large range of acts, attitudes, and postures … intending and remembering have a central role to play in any adequate philosophy of mind …. Both intentions and memories are, in a special way, personal.” Mary Warnock writes that while all creatures learn from experience and thus have memory, “[h]umans have another capacity which is to reflect on their lives and histories. This is the kind of memory that must be thought of as mental, not physical, for it must be experienced, and experienced privately within the mind of each one of us. I cannot have your memory.”
In a tradition of theorizing about memory deriving from Locke, we value experiential memory as fundamental to developing a sense of self as unified and continuous and to developing moral capacities for accountability and self-knowledge. What I find particularly interesting in Warnock's description of memory is the forceful linking of value to uniqueness through reference to what cannot be shared.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression , 1999 , pp. 227 - 257
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1999
References
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