Memory and sameness. Analysis according to the phenomenology-hermeneutic of Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

For Paul Ricoeur, Derek Parfit is an excellent archetypal of the tradition based on Locke’s identification between memory and identity. This identification, which also eclipses the question of who is subject of the action, allows human identity to be taken into a blind alley, in which only the abandonment is the way of a concern that would appear as an aporia. As Parfit himself states in his work, identity is not what matters! In addition, modern technology and post-human dreams, inspired in 20th century literary fiction, work supported by this identification from empiricism, and seem to reinforce the idea of such coincidence and, in our concept, to impoverish more the notion of memory. In first place, the article focuses on the analysis that Ricoeur makes of the memory trying to enrich its reflection with his hermeneutical perspective. Second, in the contrast to the empirical reduction of memory and in the attempt to suggest some arguments that allow us to take it a little beyond to the
biological and psychic data.