Edward Casey - Keeping the Past In Mind

For this session we'll read Edward S. Casey's 1983 essay "Keeping the Past in Mind." Our recent readings have circled the problem of consciousness; here we shift to memory, and to a philosopher who treats remembering as a phenomenon deserving study in its own right rather than as a footnote to perception or a special case of time-consciousness.

Casey opens by attacking a dichotomy he thinks has quietly warped most theories of memory: the assumption that keeping something in mind must amount to either an entirely active affair or an utterly passive one. On the activist model, the mind reconstructs or even recreates what it remembers — a picture Casey traces from the Romantic idealists through the empirical work of Bartlett and Piaget, and one he finds echoed in more than one phase of phenomenology itself. On the passive model, the mind functions as a storehouse holding inert traces until something retrieves them. Casey rejects both horns and spends the essay working out what a third option might look like — what we actually do, or undergo, when we keep the past in mind.

You can find the essay here: http://escasey.com/Article/Keeping_the_Past_in_Mind.pdf.