James Openshaw

Remembering objects

Experiential remembering—the sort characterised by sensory and affective mental imagery through which it seems that things were once a certain way in one's past—is often thought to consist in the ‘episodic’ recall of events. One might wonder whether this assimilation of experiential recall to event recall overlooks distinctive ways in which we sometimes recall ordinary, persisting objects. We often do recall objects by recalling an event in which we encountered them. But are there acts of recall which are distinctively objectual in that they are not about objects in this mediated way (i.e., by way of being about events in which they featured)? In this talk, I’ll argue that we sometimes do experientially recall objects without thereby experientially recalling events in which we encountered them. And I’ll explore some of the implications this has for understanding, e.g., the role of imagery and the distinction between remembering and imagining.

Tom Crowther

First-person Memory and the First-person Perspective

In this talk I'll raise some questions about things that J. David Velleman says in some of his work about first-person memory, the first-person perspective, and the notion of endurance through time. I will try to motivate an alternative way of explaining the phenomena that are Velleman's targets. If time allows, I will also try to draw out some of the consequences of this alternative explanation for debates about the nature of endurance as a distinctive mode of persistence through time.