3. Autobiographical consciousness

Abstract

The concepts of time, memory, and identity, which are central to autobiographical theory, are also perennial concerns of philosophers, who have given widely differing account of them, both in their formal philosophical work and in their more personal reflections. ‘Autobiographical consciousness’ takes the autobiographies of predominantly Western philosophers—including Descartes, Montaigne, Hume, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir—as central examples, and focuses on their representations of memory, the self in and through time, concepts of subjectivity, identity, and consciousness, and self-formation or ‘becoming’. It also discusses recent theories of ‘autobiographical consciousness’, including the works of Jerome Bruner and Antonio Damasio.