Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts.
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See for instance Descartes, Meditation 2; Hume’s famous claim that “Identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them” (Treatise on Human Understanding I.IV, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. [Oxford, 1978], 260); and Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason, A103-115, with his critique of Hume at A363-4.
O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 152-61. I would go further to add that in Conf. XI Augustine’s concern with time-consciousness is in service of a broader concern to elucidate Divine eternity, but that is an issue to be addressed in another paper.
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Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 647 | 73 | 13 |
Full Text Views | 149 | 6 | 2 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 115 | 15 | 4 |