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...

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...

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 ...

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 underst...

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 ...

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 "actualisa...

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  Historical documents are constructed in a context of exp...

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 20t...

Memory has an aspect of something happening to one when one has learned something but it also has a more active aspect which Freud referred to as the "work of remembering" in his work with his patients suffering from various pathological condit...

The Angel of History confronts the  growing volume of debris of our modern era in the spirit of T S Eliots "Waste Land". Hannah Arendts voice of discontent is echoed by her lover Benjamin who commits suicide because the Marxist vision has ...

The Identity of a human is of course connected to the particular memories that human possesses but memory as such is not a part of the unique essence of being human since some animals aslo have memories. Augustines conception of Time is invoked...

Refiguring Time may be what Historical writing is doing to everyday experience but it retains the before-after structure necessary to be subject to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The facts of History are not, then, a ...

Marx turned Hegel on his head with his economic/sociological theory that eschewed all froms of abstraction. Kants Critical Philosophy experienced the same fate at the hands of Hegel in a period of History characterised by extreme "change". Aris...

Wittgensteins account of the use of language rests upon instinct and action rather than on sensory powers. Ricoeurs insistence upon the "suspicious reader" and  "interpretation"  erode the trust placed in the beliefs that form a part ...

Kants aesthetics manifests traces of Aristotelian  hylomorphic ideas which assist in the analysis of narrative works of art. The author uses forms, principles and aesthetic ideas in his imitations of reality to manifest the "Form of the Go...

Bertellis essay on Aristotle and History confirms the view that Aristotles hylomorphic Philosophy would include historiography as an area of knowledge. An area that ought not to be reduced to some inner operation of thought but rather to an chr...

Phenomenological "imaginative variations" in the context of action can violate the principle of noncontradiction in the case of problematic actions such as committing suicide but this does not compromise the Aristotelain "before-after structure...

Historical traces in the form of historical documents are conceptual transfigurations of significant experienced events of magnitude that affect the weals and woes of the polis. Heidegger focuses upon the future and the humanistic quality of Ca...

Inner time consciousness as conceived of phenomenologically would not meet the criteria of Aristotelian  or Kantian accounts which would differ depending upon whether the contexts were theoretical or practical. Heideggers account of Care f...

Kant is accused of embracing an epistomological ontology when it is clear that he is highly critical of such positions , wishing to insist upon the importance of practical reasoning and the good will in all characterisations of human psuché. Ne...

The Time of the Soul and the Time of the Cosmos are interrelated perhaps because of the object relatedness of the experience of human psuché. Aristotles definition of Time and Kants characterisation of the experience of time in the case of a bo...

The modern novel shatters the ordinary experience of time Ricoeur argues citing three literary examples to support his case. We argue that there is indeed an analagous strcture to the time as represented in the novel and our lived time. 

Heideggers concepts of Being -in-the-World, Dasein, the ready-to-hand, and present-at-hand are discussed in relation to Analytic Philosophy. Aristotle is wrongly accused of an "analytic" view of logos. Aletheia is connected by Hedegger with the...

Linguistic Structuralism and Sociology  is evoked by Ricoeur in order to analyse the essence of narrative. This, we argue, fails to recognise the extent to which narratives are imperative-driven activities , trans-scientific in their natur...

Modern Art is subjected to a phenomenological investigation and Ricoeur claims that the narrative form has changed significantly during the modern era, manifesting a loss of the organising characteristic of a "plot". Aristotle saw the plot as a...