Remember Who You Are: Personal Identity and Memory

Marya Schechtman (University of Illinois, Chicago)

Abstract:

Many people have memories they prize deeply. Such memories are often preserved with the help of scrapbooks, journals, mementos, social media pages, and reminiscence. They are frequently described as "treasures" that "cannot be taken away". At one level, the fact that people wish to hold on to and revisit events from their past may seem too obvious to require explanation. As it happens, however, it is difficult to articulate the general characteristics of treasured memories or to say what, exactly, makes them so valuable. This talk explores these questions, placing one source of value in the role these memories can play in constituting and maintaining both personal identity and intimate social relationships. This in turn reveals an important way in which our identity over time is inherently bound up with our relationships to those with whom we share a remembered past. After describing this source of value, the talk considers traditions that argue we would do better to let go of the past and live in the present. It looks also at the question of what kind of ethical obligations, if any, we might have to remember parts of our past. While several conclusions will be drawn, the talk emphasizes the need to recognize wide cultural and interpersonal variation in the ways humans relate to the personal past, and to be mindful of their implications.

Speaker:

Marya Schechtman is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She writes extensively on personal identity and memory and is the author of The Constitution of Selves (Cornell University Press, 1996), Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), and The Self: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024), along with many papers and articles on these topics.