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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
My ultimate concern is with how it can be that the past, and in particular my past, matters, in broadly non-causal ways, to the present, and in particular my present. How can it matter to me to have done things, and to remember having done them? However, I take some time to get to this concern, for I believe it should not be there at all, or at any rate take the form it does. So this needs explaining first.
1 In The House of Doctor Dee, by Ackroyd, P., (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1993). I have discussed some aspects of this view, and related views, in a number of earlier papers, in particular ‘How Can We Seize the Past?’, Philosophy, 64 (1989), pp. 67–78.Google Scholar
2 The list is not of course intended to be exhaustive. I am aware that it needs refining, and that a different discussion would need some pretty hard semantics on the subject of truth conditions and assertion conditions. Since I have broached this, I mention that I believe that memory judgments are among the classes of judgments where assertibility may fall short of truth. To what must a memory be faithful? May there not be many varieties and layers of fidelity: ‘From the moment of my knowing of the death of my mother, the idea of her as she had been of late had vanished from me. I remember her … only as the young mother of my earliest impressions … In her death she winged her way back to her calm, untroubled youth, and cancelled all the rest’ (C. Dickens, David Copperfield, (St. Ives: Penguin, 1994), p. 119)
3 Wittgenstein, , On Certainty, 350, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 45e.Google Scholar
4 Wittgenstein, , Op. cit., 352, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 46e.Google Scholar
I have no idea if Wittgenstein would accept my diagnoses, but the commingling of first- and second-order concerns is surely identical. And there are other cases where this commingling is deliberate-and effective, just as much when one is showing off (‘Look! No hands!’) or instructing as when one fears one is ‘no use any more’.
5 Becker, Carl, ‘What are historical facts?’, The Philosophy of History in Our TimeGoogle Scholar, ed. Meyerhoff, H., 1959, p. 124 (et passim).Google Scholar
6 Kristeva, Julia, Life and Death of Speech; see the section entitled ‘A Past That Does Not Pass By’, pp. 60–61.Google Scholar
7 Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Section VI,‘Of Personal Identity’, ed. by MacNabb, D. G. C., (London: Fontana, 1962), p. 300.Google Scholar
8 Op. cit., pp. 301–302.
9 This is not intended as a remotely exhaustive discussion of the place of memory in self-identity, but as the identification of one place it cannot conceivably occupy.
10 At certain stages of dementia people find everything a novelty and cannot find their bearings. Their present no longer recapitulates their past. So does not the slice model have application to them at any rate, but without the linking mechanisms? Well, we might say this, but how does it help? The point is that the model fails in general. For if the past were not already present, how could we, demented or alert, possibly know where to effect the link-ups? In fact, we have a general need for an epistemology for pathological conditions. Thus, there is something wrong about saying that a person with dementia has forgotten her name, or that he is her son.What should we say instead?.
11 James, Henry, The Lesson of the Master, (London: Penguin, 1985), 49.Google Scholar
12 From Cohen, Morton N., Lewis Carroll: A Biography, (London:Macmillan, 1995), p. 90.Google Scholar
13 The Observer newspaper, 12.7.1992.
14 As in Anny's case in Sartre's Nausea: I live in the past. I recall everything that happened to me and I arrange it. … Our story is quite beautiful. I add a few truths here and there, and it makes awhole string of perfect moments. For a severe view of suchlike fantasizing see my ‘When is Fantasising Morally Bad?’, Philosophical Investigations, 11, No. 2, (4 1988), pp.112–132.
15 ‘All the Blood Within Me, My Enemy's Enemy, Amis, K., (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 156.Google Scholar I discuss some aspects of Plato 's view about what matters lastingly in ‘Can My Survival be Subrogated?’, Philosophy 59 (1984), pp. 443–456.Google Scholar