Remembering ‘Remembering’

Abstract

When you consider something again, or do it again, you ‘re-call’, ‘reminisce’, ‘re-member’, ‘re-late’, ‘re-count’ or ‘re-peat’. It can seem more philosophical, though, to attach maximum significance to one special word. In the various traditional areas of philosophy, this supposed intensification of meaning has been practised on notions like ‘conscious’,‘physical, ‘universal’, ‘good’ and ‘beauty’. When C. B. Martin and I wrote ‘Remembering’ (Martin and Deutscher 1966) we began with the intention to ‘define what it is to remember’. Avoiding reference to the word, we headed straight for the unique phenomenon (‘back to the things themselves’ as Husserl had put it).