Albert Newen & Tobias Starzak (Philosophy, Bochum)

09.02.2021, 14.00 – 15.30 (online via zoom)

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Diane Pecher (Psychology, Rotterdam)

05.02.2021, 14.00 (online via zoom)

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Carlos Montemayor (San Francisco State University)

Transactional collective memory.

04.02.2021, 16:15-17:45 CET (UTC+01:00).

Online Lecture via zoom.

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Abstract: In previous work, I argued that the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness plays a normative role in memory. Memories that are episodically recalled in order to act, decide, and plan are not necessarily phenomenally conscious, and they play a truth-conducive or epistemic role. By contrast, memories that have a rich phenomenal profile on the basis of their experienced vividness and salient value in our personal narrative play a moral and aesthetic role. These two roles are not incompatible and interact in various ways, although they are dissociable. In this talk, I explore this distinction in the counterintuitive context of collective memory. I shall argue that this normative difference is more general than its psychological association with consciousness—it is a feature that depends on meaning-making memories versus mere memory reports. The contribution of this approach is that while the phenomenology of memory is subjectively crucial for the saliency of memories, it is insufficient to explain the general distinction between meaningfully narrative and merely episodic memories. More precisely, while phenomenology provides familiarity with our past, the difference between meaning-making and episodic memories is more general than the familiarity provided by phenomenology, and it requires an independent account. Topics in historiography and legal evidence are explored to assess various options, showing the advantages of a unified transactional approach to individual and collective memories.

Colin Allen (Pittsburgh) & Antonella Tramacere (Jena)

02.02.2021 – 14:00 – 15:30 (via zoom)

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Sven Bernecker (Universität zu Köln)

The moral excusability of forgetting.

28.01.2021, 10:00-11:30 CET (UTC+01:00).

Online Lecture via zoom.

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Abstract: Does moral ignorance due to forgetting exculpate wrongdoing? Could an agent be blamelessly ignorant of, say, the fact that one ought to be tolerant of differences; or would such an ignorance always imply a lack of good will? I argue that the debate about the exculpation of forgetting-based moral ignorance suffers from two defects. First, the debate does not first consider the rules for which morally relevant memory behaviors we ought to perform and avoid. Second, the debate lacks a proper understanding of the processes by which people forget the difference between right and wrong. When we examine the processes by which people remember or forget the correct moral theory or acquire a twisted one, we see that excuses are not binary but gradable: they can be weaker or stronger, mitigating blame to greater or lesser extent (Sliwa 2020). This paper argues that moral ignorance (due to forgetting) may well excuse but not exculpate — it may lessen the blameworthiness of a forgetting-involving wronging but not so much as to warrant forgiveness.