Sven Bernecker, Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, will deliver a lecture at 5:15 p.m. this Thursday, Oct. 22, in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons as part of the Washington and Lee University Roger Mudd Center for Ethics’ series, “Memory, Mind and Morality.”
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Carrying the Blame: The Memory Conditions of Responsibility Over Time.”
Widely recognized as one of the leading contemporary philosophers of memory, Bernecker’s work examines memory as a complex epistemic and ethical phenomenon.
In his talk, Bernecker will explore the intersection of blame and memory, starting from the notion that holding someone responsible for a past deed may require that they, in some sense, still remember it. Theories of personal identity since the Enlightenment lean on episodic, autonoetic memory, or recalling the act from the inside; but the central question becomes whether blameworthiness relies on this “inside” recollection or can persist through a different kind of memory, outlasting our capacity to recall what we did.
“Dr. Bernecker advances the field by bringing questions of memory into dialogue with ethics and responsibility, which extends the conversation beyond the traditional framework of epistemology (the theory of knowledge),” said Melissa Kerin, director of the Mudd Center. “His work has implications not only for philosophy, but also for social and collective memory, neuro-ethics and the ethical challenges posed by AI technologies.”
