First-Personal Memory: Locke, Freud, and Wittgenstein

At the start of the quarter, we’ll distinguish an investigation of remembering, understood as something that a person does, from the kind of subpersonal inquiry into mechanisms of encoding, storage, and retrieval that figure in cognitive scientific accounts of “memories” (in one sense of this term that will need elucidation). Our investigation will be of the former sort. In pursuing it, we’ll explore connections between remembering and consciousness, i.e., between the sort of conscious awareness that I ordinarily enjoy of my current thoughts, feelings, experiences, etc., on the one hand, and the sort of awareness I have of my past thoughts, feelings, and experiences (i.e., those that I've not forgotten), on the other. Amongst our aims will be to gain an understanding of: (1) what Locke gets right when he suggests that “consciousness can be extended backwards to [a] past Action or Thought”; (2) what Freud gets right when he suggests that a person may come to remember, and so be able to give voice to, an experience that had previously been unconscious; and (3) how a person’s relations to her past are formally different from the relations a non-linguistic animal can bear to its past.

Although this course has no official prerequisites, it is not an introduction to philosophy. You’ll have an easier time in it if you’ve already studied some epistemology or metaphysics and, ideally, spent some time engaged with the work of Wittgenstein or Freud. (B) (IV)