Hirai’s Bergsonism about episodic memory, situated

Abstract

In the introduction to his major work of philosophy, Mind and Matter, Henri Bergson declares that both spirit and matter exist, and that we can determine the precise relation between them through the study of memory. More than a century later, Yasushi Hirai takes up this project and outlines an original and distinct interpretation and development of the Bergsonian approach to episodic memory. Hirai’s approach follows Bergson by offering an account of episodic memory that accepts the preservation-in-itself thesis, namely the idea that past experiences persist in their phenomenal form without relying on any external medium or brain traces. On the Hirai-Bergsonian approach, one reason that memory traces stored in the brain are to be rejected is that episodic remembering has a phenomenal, qualitative character that cannot be explained by traces stored in the brain. In this paper, I focus on providing an account of this phenomenal character of episodic remembering. First, I pose some open questions for Hirai’s Bergsonism, suggesting that some features of remembering seem best explained by appealing to a trace theory rather than the preservation-in-itself thesis. Second, I suggest that the trace theorist can better explain the phenomenology of remembering by appealing to a situated approach. Part of the richness of the phenomenal character of remembering is supplied by people, places, or objects in the present combined with information provided by a trace. This account also helps explain phenomenally impoverished remembering more easily than the Bergsonian account.