A Phenomenology of Forgetting

Despite the ubiquity of forgetting in human life, scholarly research has said relatively little about it. The following project aims to begin to remedy this neglect by offering a phenomenological analysis of the pivotal role that forgetting plays in making us who we are. By foregrounding the experiential impact of forgetting, this phenomenological approach will move beyond the reductive view of forgetting as a mere failure to ‘encode an input,’ or an absence of a ‘neural trace’, and it will allow me to illuminate the crucial role forgetting plays in our existence. Along the way I will discuss various threads in the epistemology and metaphysics of memory to provide a new way of looking at forgetting via a phenomenologically informed view of our mindedness: that we are best placed to understand the role of forgetting if we foreground the idea that mindedness is based in care.