Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Russell suggested in The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and the Theory of Knowledge manuscript (1913) that we have memory acquaintance with past objects before repudiating acquaintance entirely in work that became The Analysis of Mind (1921). Many commentators have found the idea of memory acquaintance (in contrast to sensory acquaintance) peculiarly problematic. In this talk I explore various unsatisfactory objections to the idea before trying to tease out what is fundamentally problematic in Russell's original conception of memory and what lessons we can learn from this for the notion of acquaintance more generally.