Remember Who You Are: Personal Identity and Memory, Marya Schechtman

We all have "treasured" memories we prize deeply, and we preserve these with the help of scrapbooks, journals, mementos, social media pages, and reminiscence. But what, exactly, makes these treasured memories so valuable? In this talk, Marya Schechtman explores this question and more, focusing particularly on the value these memories have in helping constitute and maintain both personal identity and intimate social relationships, and the ethical questions that might arise from this.

This is the third lecture in the London Lecture Series 2024-25: Remembering and Forgetting. Watch the rest of the series here:    • Remembering and Forgetting: London Le...  

About the Speaker:
Marya Schechtman is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She writes extensively on personal identity and memory and is the author of The Constitution of Selves (Cornell University Press, 1996), Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (Oxford University Press, 2014), and The Self: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024), along with many papers and articles on these topics.

Lecture Intro - 00:00
Marya's Talk - 00:55
Q&A - 52:30