Search results

We cannot rethink the ethical and political dimensions of memory—especially its role in constituting persons and identities—without rethinking the nature of memory itself. I first describe a traditional epistemological view of memory, according to which memory is a faculty for preserving knowledge of the past, and then juxtapose a relational theory of memory developed by Sue Campbell. The relational theory is represented in terms of a distinction between actions and achievements; this distinction enables us to both clarify and defend the shift from an epistemological to a political conception of memory. On the resulting view, accuracy, not truth, is the appropriate norm for evaluating memory, and remembering is no longer conceived as an interior process. In the penultimate section I confront an objection to a relational theory of memory—and to relational theories of cognition generally—and suggest a strategy of response.

Preface -- Editors' Introduction -- Note on Sources -- Introduction: The Second Voice: A Manifesto -- Part I. Our Faithfulness to the Past -- 1: Models of Minds and Memory Activities -- 2: Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Values -- 3: Memory, Truth, and the Search for Integrity -- Part II. Memory, Diversity and Solidarity -- 4: Inside the Frame of the Past: Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity -- 5: Memory, Reparation, and Relation: Starting in the Right Places -- 6: Remembering Who We Are: Responsibility and Resistant Identification -- Part III. Remembering for the Future -- 7: Remembering for the Future: Memory as a Lens on the Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts: Recognizing Disrespectful Challenge

Here, essays by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell explore the entanglement of epistemic and ethical values in our attempts to be faithful to our pasts. Her relational conception of memory is used to confront the challenges of sharing memory and reconstituting selves even in contexts fractured by moral and political differences