Deciding to forget a traumatic experience involving violence such as the establishment of Athens might be a kind of sublimation of ones own anger at oneself. Such an act may have a cathartic aspect and as such be the last good act of a chain of evil consequences. The Historian, however, has a duty to remember that violence and be as accurate as they can be about the relevant events and their causes. The Angel of History bears witness to the accumulating faults of man with some trepidation.

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Delphic Podcast

Freudian accounts of trauma and the compulsion to repeat until the trauma is "understood" and subjected to a process of catharsis are intimately connected to the themes of memory and forgetting. The Brain is obviously part of the material cause of the phenomena of remembering and forgetting but it is more the organisational structure of the brain more than particular areas that is the material substrate of even simple mental phenomena such as the perception of colours where, for example it is not distinct colours that disappear if damage occurs but rather the saturation of the entire colour spectrum.

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Delphic Podcast

The work of remembering and the work of expectation are civilisation building and culture enhancing aspects of our "Being-in-the-world": the being in the world of the human psuché. The Bible, many philosophers argue including Spinoza, Kant and Wittgenstein, does contain a work of remembering but this might not be as complete as the more eschatological aspect of the work of expectation we encounter in Biblical texts, including the Gnostic Gospels.

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Delphic Podcast

Nietzsche and the nihilstic force of the will to power and Collingwoods thesis that almost anything can be counted as historical evidence for anything sets the relativistic scene for Ricoeurs reflections. The categorical powers of understanding, judgement and reasoning are marginalised and called into question during Ricoeurs sceptical exploration of the trans-scientiifc discipline of History.

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Delphic Podcast

The Work of remembering is not a work of the imagination but involves memory understanding, judgement and reasoning. Non Historical narratives may use the power of imagination to a greater degree when communicating aesthetic ideas of the artist via their works of art but here too there is a distinct presence of imperatively driven rational judgements.

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Delphic Podcast

The civilising process is discussed in relation to modern relativising ideas and connected to a "rationalising process" rather than categorical rationality of the kind we encounter in the works of Aristotle and Kant. The Aristotelian "actualisation process, whilst not related to "mentalities" as characterised in Ricouers account is however related to the development of powers of mind such as sensibility, understanding and reason.

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Delphic Podcast

Augustine asks the aporetic question "What is Time?", rejects the Aristotelian account that refers to external motion and insists instead upon some sort of "distention" of the soul. Historical documents are constructed in a context of explanation/justification and occur in a community of critics who are testing the veracity of these documents in accordance with a number of different principles.

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Delphic Podcast

The school of inwardness was created by the thought of St Augustine, Descartes Hoobes, Locke and a number of 20th century Analytical Philosophers seeking to escape the "idealism" of Hegels Phenomenology as well as the Phenomeologists of the 20th century seeking to restore the work of Hegel to a prominent place in the History of Philosophy. The Later work of Wittgenstein, criticising his own earlier logical solipsism created a logical space for the reemergence of Aristotelian and Kantain Ciritical Philosophy.

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Delphic Podcast