The Phenomenology of Forgetting and the Constitution of Personal Identity

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Despite the ubiquity of forgetting in human life, scholarly research has said relatively little about it. My proposed research aims to begin to remedy this neglect by offering a phenomenological analysis of the pivotal role that forgetting plays in the constitution of personal identity. This analysis will investigate how my experience of who I am is impacted by i) what I forget about myself, ii) what particular significant others forget about me, and iii) what my culture forgets too. In other words, I will consider the central question from the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. By foregrounding the experiential impact of forgetting, this phenomenological approach will move beyond the reductive view of forgetting as a mere failure to 'encode an input,' or an absence of a 'neural trace', and it will allow me to illuminate the crucial role forgetting plays in our experience of who we are. Moreover, this project will not only offer a sophisticated phenomenological account of forgetting; it will also provide a felicitous point of departure for addressing applied issues of forgetting in the digital and medical humanities.ScheduleYear 1 - Literature review. Thesis 1: Phenomenological analysis of the first-person impact of forgetting for personal identity. Compare findings to psychological case studies of dementia and amnesia with a view to providing a paper asoutlined above.Year 2 - Thesis 2: Analyse the second-person dimension of forgetting. Draw on this research to highlight the ethical 'right to be forgotten online' for second paper as above.Year 3 - Thesis 3: Analyse the third-person dimension. Relate this research to cultural amnesia and findings from the CLHLWR for a third paper as above. Revision of thesis.