Marina Folescu (University of Missouri): Some Remarks on Reid's View of Memorial Conception
Some Remarks on Reid’s View of Memorial Conception
Marina Folescu
Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons, and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. Elsewhere, I have argued that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid’s notion of perceptual conception (i.e. of the conception employed in perception). The present paper picks up where the other left off and answers the same question for the faculty of memory: what type of conception does it employ? Just as in the case of perception, without supplying an answer to this question, we are not in a position to fully understand how memory can give us “immediate knowledge of things past”(EIP II.1, p. 253).