La mémoire autobiographique demande-t-elle un concept de temps linéaire?

Abstract

In contemporary philosophy, memory is no longer an instrument that apprehends events in a passive way. Here, we discuss the memory possessed by a person when he or she remembers his or her own life, or rather a specific moment of it. This concept, which is one of the most ancient ones in cognitive psychology, is called autobiographical memory. Due to this very pertinent interpretation of a more vivid kind memory in the science, literature and philosophy of our times, we will question if, through its activity, memory is dependent of a linear temporality or if it rather creates its own. Some authors have tried to respond to such problem, and here we will discuss three: Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell and John Campbell, who is in fact a contemporary philosopher, while we try to establish connections between them, with the objective of finding which questions and answers have survived the death of the first mentioned thinkers. Through this research, we will notice that if the concept of memory was before specifically studied always in relation to that of image, the analytic tradition frequently places it at the side of the personal identity notion. Nonetheless, what remains in common is the effort of thinking recollection beyond practical life, i.e. as a psychic faculty that orients all of our choices and our apprehension of the world in a way that seems detached of a mere opposition between linear and circular time, which by itself represents a philosophical problem already questioned in the last century.