We identify a particular type of causal reasoning ability that we believe is required for the possession of episodic memories, as it is needed to give substance to the distinction between the past and the present. We also argue that the same causal reasoning ability is required for grasping the point that another person's appeal to particular past events can have in conversation. We connect this to claims in developmental psychology that participation in joint reminiscing plays a key role in (...) memory development. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider a kind of social group that I call ‘epistemic’. It is constituted by its members’ possession of perceptually grounded common knowledge, which endows them with a particular kind of epistemic authority. This authority, I argue, is invoked in the activity of ‘joint reminiscing’—of remembering together a past jointly experienced event. Joint reminiscing, in turn, plays an important role in the constitution of social and personal identity. The notion of an epistemic group, then, is a concept (...) that helps explain an important aspect of a subject’s understanding of who she is. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de confronter la réminiscence platonicienne à la connaissance a priori kantienne. Pour ce faire, après avoir rappelé la différence entre connaissance a priori et connaissance innée selon Kant, il se tourne vers l’interprétation néokantienne de la réminiscence platonicienne par Paul Natorp. Il montre ensuite, en examinant en particulier des passages du Phédon et du Théétète, que le point le plus critiquable de l’interprétation de Natorp est moins sa compréhension de la connaissance atteinte par la réminiscence platonicienne (...) comme étant a priori que comme étant transcendantale. (shrink)

picture and image of the universe? How much can he mirror of the illimitable cosmos, material and spiritual, knowable or unknowable? How much can he realize the abstruse relation between its two antithetical but complementary sides? That is how to judge in any deeper and wider sense of a brain and its capacity. I was talking once in a London drawing-room with Cotter Morison and a famous and able literary hostess. I happened to say, as I say now, that Spencer (...) seemed to me by far the greatest mind I had ever met with. “What?” cried the lady surprised; “would you put him above George Eliot?” To me, I confess, the question seemed almost ludicrous. Imaginative work is beautiful and attractive, just as artistic work is; but to suppose it can be put on a par, so far as the measure of intellect is concerned, with scientific or philosophic work seems to me to betoken a certain lack of just standards of capacity. “Vanity Fair” is great in its way; and its way is just as incommensurate with the greatness of the “Principia” or of the “Principles of Biology” as is the greatness of the Transfiguration or the Venus of Milos. But if we want to measure minds, as minds, one against another, I say fearlessly that scientific and philosophic grasp is the one true standard of the highest attainment, and that no man who ever yet trod our planet gave proof of such mastery in both these lines as Herbert Spencer. (shrink)

"This autobiographical reminiscing started more than ten years ago," wrote German-American philosopher Paul Arthur Schilpp at the age of ninety-five.

On relativistic covariance, modelism vs. formalism, and poetry.

Nietzschean reminiscences of Schelling? The title seems to suggest either that Schelling can remember forward to Nietzsche or that some more positive reminiscence of Schelling lies hidden in Nietzsche’s work. Perhaps there is something like a forward-looking remembrance. Perhaps every thinker looks forward to those few who will pick up the thread of his or her thinking—not as the “unthought” of that thinking, but as the very thread that Ariadne ravels and allows to trail behind her. Perhaps too there (...) is something in Nietzsche’s work that demands a more sympathetic and protracted response to Schelling than the response Nietzsche appears to offer. (shrink)

The first part of this article deals with two cases of what seems to be Aristotelian reminiscences in the works of Philo of Alexandria. A passage in Quod deterius and a passage in De agricultura show close verbal reminiscences to two passages in Book i of Nicomachean Ethics; and a passage in De migratione Abrahami shows verbal reminiscences to two passages in Book ii. Since it appears from Book v of De finibus that Antiochus of Ascalon had already read at (...) least parts of Nicomachean Ethics; and the first commentator on the Ethics, Aspasius, has clear references to some predecessors who had already read and discussed this work, I argue for the possibility that Philo also read the Nicomachean Ethics. The second part deals with an almost forgotten book review by Jacob Freudenthal, published in 1875, which argues that Philo was familiar with various parts of the Aristotelian corpus as we have it. I examine his detailed arguments and conclude that, with all due respect to a great scholar, they do not seem to prove his point. (shrink)

This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s 1986 letter to French film critic Serge Daney about cinema, television, and images in control societies through a Benjaminian lens. While neither Deleuze nor Daney deeply engage with Walter Benjamin’s thought, I argue that the ideas or dialectical images constructed by the German thinker are crucial to better understand Deleuze’s and Daney’s thoughts regarding the threatened death of modern cinema in the 1980s because of the predominance of television as a control apparatus. In the first (...) part of the article, I analyze the aesthetical and political meaning of the concept of history as/of perception. I also show affinities between Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s works through their connection to art historian Aloïs Riegl. In the sec- ond part, I demonstrate how Deleuze’s and Daney’s reflections about mannerism as a weapon against the rise of clichés and the ideology of the visible in control societies must be supplemented by Benjamin’s concept of “construction”. In conclusion, I draw on Benjamin’s discussion of politics as a body space to advocate for desiring mannerisms to fight control apparatuses and the reign of clichés. (shrink)