Scotus therefore emphasized that it is important to distinguish between two types of object: perceived things and earlier acts of perceiving. John Duns Scotus had already pointed out that it would be inappropriate to understand memory as a mental phenomenon that relates a person simply to previously perceived things, for it relates her just as much to her own previous acts of perceiving. Footnote 1 Nor was he the first to notice that acts of remembering are very special acts that somehow bring back both external things and one’s own acts. To be sure, Ockham was not the first medieval author to analyze the intentionality of memory. These two ways of specifying the object of an act of remembering give rise to a crucial question: how is the intentionality of memory to be understood? Is memory directed at things that were present in the past, or at one’s own acts of cognition that occurred in the past? Or is it directed at both? And if so, how can there be double intentionality? This is the problem I want to discuss by examining William of Ockham’s theory of memory. This means, of course, that there are now many intentional acts that are immediately directed at many different objects. And you cannot talk about the deer unless each of you somehow brings back his or her act and then focuses on its content. It is therefore misleading to say that you and your friends remember the very same thing, for each of you remembers his or her own act of seeing. It is thus not the deer that you directly remember you remember it only insofar as it was the content of your act of seeing. For instance, you remember that you saw it in the early morning, just after reaching a clearing in the forest. You could also say that, strictly speaking, all you remember is your own seeing of the deer. Technically speaking, this means that there are now many intentional acts directed at one object.īut this is not the only possible description of the situation. The friends who accompanied you on that tour remember the same thing, since the deer was present to all of you hence you can all talk about the very same thing. This is why you can describe it in detail when you now talk about the hiking tour. What exactly do you remember? At first sight, the answer seems obvious: you remember the deer as it was standing there in front of you, a beautiful animal with huge antlers. Suppose you saw an impressive deer last summer while you were on a hiking tour in the Swiss Alps, and you are now remembering this event.
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