Fernández offers an account of the nature of episodic memory that marries two core ideas: role-functionalism about episodic memory, and self-reflexive mnemonic content. One payoff of this view is that episodic memory judgments are immune to error through misidentification. Fernández takes this to reveal something important about the nature of one’s self-awareness in memory and our first-person conception of ourselves. However, once one sees why such judgments are immune in this way, according to the proposed account, the fact that they (...) are immune becomes moot. While technically immune to error through misidentification, episodic memory judgments are not grounded in a way such that they have any interesting epistemological import for the subject, and any insights about our self-awareness and self-conception are directly derivable from the metaphysics of memory content alone. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEpisodic memory is the ability to revisit events in one's personal past, to relive them as if one travelled back in mental time. It has widely been assumed that such an ability imposes a metaphysical requirement on selves. Buddhist philosophers, however, deny the requirement and therefore seek to provide accounts of episodic memory that are metaphysically parsimonious. The idea that the memory perspective is a centred field of experience whose phenomenal constituents are simulacra of an earlier field of experience, yet (...) attended to in a way that presents them as happening again, is, I suggest, a better one than that the memory perspective consists in taking as object-aspect the subject-aspect of the earlier experience, or the idea that it consists in labelling a representation of the earlier experience with an I-tag. (shrink)

-/- Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves (...) as themselves; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such. -/- A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves. (shrink)