Lecture Series

In this talk, I will sketch a phenomenological account of how the autobiographical past remains unfixed and continues to offer up significant possibilities. These possibilities, I suggest, serve to sustain, disrupt, and re-consolidate a non-localized, dynamic sense of who we are, in ways that are inseparable from how we experience time. I begin by reflecting on the analogy of a bore wave, as employed in a novel by Julian Barnes. Building on this, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in order to address how our memories are revised in light of our current concerns and vice versa. Then, by adapting Edmund Husserl’s conception of temporal “protention”, I show how acts of remembering are integral to a process of ongoing reconciliation between our current orientation towards the future and the autobiographical past. I focus throughout on a distinctive way in which the past sometimes comes alive, taking on certain future-like qualities.

Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. His work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of the books Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (MIT Press, 2022)