Understanding a life

Nigel Warburton

: There’s a kind of orthodoxy in philosophy that memory makes us what we are, and that anyone’s life only extends as far back as he or she can remember – at least when we are talking about what makes each of us the same person over time. That is part of what makes dementia so sad: it removes the individual’s sense of his or her self as the connection with a particular narrative is erased or replaced by elaborate confabulation. Many people think that a point comes where the person with dementia ceases to be the person he or she was, though alive, that person is lost to other people, and even to the individual. Here John Locke has been a major influence, at least as he’s usually been interpreted, with his emphasis on memory as the criterion of personal identity. I wonder if you could begin by saying how convincing you find that approach centring on memory as an account of what it is to be a human person.

Galen Strawson: Not convincing at all – although I’m not quite sure what’s in question. When people say this sort of thing, do they mean memories that are available for unprompted recall?

On this account if you can’t remember something, it’s not part of you as a person. It might be part of you as an animal, a biological entity, in that it happened to this member of this species, but not of you as a person.

I don’t think that any part of my past is part of me now. And that’s not because I’m some kind of ‘presentist’ who only thinks that the present exists.

You have to realise that that’s quite an unusual position to take. Most of us think of our pasts as part