Memeory has an aspect of something happening to one when one has learned something but it also has a more active aspect which Freud referred to as the "work of remembering" in his work with his patients suffering from various pathological conditions. Lockes attempt to epistemologise memory by making it a psychological part of the identity of a man reduces the wider focus of thinkers like Aristotle, Kant and Freud.

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Delphic Podcast

The Angel of History confronts the growing volume of debris of our modern era in the spirit of T S Eliots "Waste Land". Hannah Arendts voice of discontent is echoed by her lover Benjamin who commits suicide because the Marxist vision has disappointed and the Nazis are closing in on him. Ricoeur argues that it is the duty of human psuché to remember crimes committed against humanity.

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The Identity of a human is of course connected to the particular memories that human possesses but memory as such is not a part of the unique essence of being human since some animals aslo have memories. Augustines conception of Time is invoked by the phenomenologists as a competing account to those accounts we find in Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy. Narrative and time are linked in Ricoeurs account in ways that neither Aristotle nor kant would find plausible.

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Delphic Podcast

Refiguring Time may be what Historical writing is doing to everyday experience but it retains the before-after structure necessary to be subject to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The facts of History are not, then, a matter of interpretation but rather amongst the necessary conditions of the knowledge bearing activity of History. The Kingdom of Ends postulated by Kant is an ideal future whose promise is uncertain but it is in some sense part of the conditional structure of ought judgements such as "promises ought to kept"

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Marx turned Hegel on his head with his economic/sociological theory that eschewed all froms of abstraction. Kants Critical Philosophy experienced the same fate at the hands of Hegel in a period of History characterised by extreme "change". Aristotle, we know provided us with a theory of change that did not leave us in a suspended state of ambiguity which it can be argued was the case after the theorising of Hegel and Marx. Kant elaborated on this theory of change but both Philosophies were swept away in this era of radical change.

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Wittgensteins account of the use of language rests upon instinct and action rather than on sensory powers. Ricoeurs insistence upon the "suspicious reader" and "interpretation" erode the trust placed in the beliefs that form a part of the construction and appreciation of historical texts. Beliefs such as "the earth has existed for a long period of time" are conditions for the understanding of and reasoning about historical texts.

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AKants aesthetics manifests traces of Aristotelian hylomorphic ideas which assist in the analysis of narrative works of art. The author uses forms, principles and aesthetic ideas in his imitations of reality to manifest the "Form of the Good". The form of universality of the productive work of art is similar to that of the productive speech of the politician who uses rhetoric to "persuade his audience via enthymemes. The work involved on the part of the creator and the audience, then, is a work of understanding and reason rather than a work of imagination, appealing to the judgement s of the many and/or the wise.

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Bertellis essay on Aristotle and History confirms the view that Aristotles hylomorphic Philosophy would include historiography as an area of knowledge. An area that ought not to be reduced to some inner operation of thought but rather to an chronology of facts regulated by principles. Customs and Traditions are both described and explained in History as part of its moral mission

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Delphic Podcast