Ultimately the issue ends up being persistence or recreation. It’s a very interesting philosophical question.

I can also see why Joe suggests there isn’t a Derridean move. Ricoeur explicitly notes that with respect to memory he is following Husserl more than Heidegger. I’m not sure how he’ll manage this. It’s interesting he’s going to make that move and I think it gets into that whole Khora vs. The One dichotomy (or fulness of truth vs. prime matter) between the two. I’m clearly much more on the Derridean side so this will be an interesting debate to see.

I’d argue that the passage from the Sophist he quotes gets into this. There Socrates splits the icon in to two types. One is a replica that maintains all the same proportions, colors and so forth. The other is one where one has different perspectives. Socrates discusses this relative to beauty but I think something deeper is meant. One might say that what we have is the icon as seen in analytic philosophy as a kind of replicable entity with the same proper properties versus something more out of a Nietzschean perspectivism.

At least that’s how it struck me when reading the relevant passages in the Sophist last night. (I’d encourage everyone to break out their Platos, by the way, it really does clarify a lot that Ricoeur is doing)

One interesting thing is that in the section before the passage in the Sophist Ricoeur discusses is a wonderful line. There Socrates discounts (perhaps merely to catch his interlocutor) the metaphor of a gardner for memory. However many of us would argue that is precisely the metaphor to use rather than the craftsman metaphors that they instead head towards.

Ricoeur moves through it so quickly, it seems to me, because he is “only” employing it (at least, this early in the study) in order to show that it (the aporia) is what is shared by memory and imagination, which he hopes to disambiguate without imposing an absolute separation. To get caught up in the aporia itself at this early point is, I think Ricoeur would say, to miss what he is trying to do. The aporia, I assume, will get plenty of attention during the course of the book, but for now it must be seen as the what brings memory and imagination together, even as they are to be distinguished.

In a word (hopefully better written than the above two paragraphs): the aporia must for now only be seen to be what forces us to recognize that while memory represents a relation to the truth, it does so always by grounding itself in the classic aporia of the present absent, always by being founded paradoxically. This is the what (truth, “and yet…”) that leads to the how (given that truth, how does memory happen?)…

Also, I found this SEP entry on “Types and Tokens” which (so far) looks quite interesting and helpful for sorting out some of these issues that Ricoeur is getting at (I agree that Ricoeur isn’t particularly clear in this first section, but then my newness to philosophy makes me more apt to chalk that up to my own inadequacy as a reader than fault Ricoeur!). If nothing else, I think the article will be helpful in giving us a vocabulary in which to think about and discuss Ricoeur’s work.

I agree this is setting the stage for what he’ll explore and articulate. But that’s a very good reason to get clear in our minds what is at stake. The genealogy of the problem.

That’s why I surprised everyone appears to have skimmed through this section so quickly without making a comment about this beginning. I’d argue that often the first and last chapters are the ones we must pay the most attention to.

Joe, I think there’s a lot of Derrida here although the focus is quite polar opposite. (Derrida looking down, Ricoeur looking up : as I mentioned in slightly different words in my list of their differences) But I think the basic approach is actually pretty similar. The difference is how they respond to the aporias. Which is partially why I asked my question about whether Ricoeur was secretly making snide comments about Derrida. (Perhaps snide isn’t quite right) We’ll see when we get to chapter 3 and Ricoeur engages Derrida more directly.

I’m not really familiar with Lacan or Badiou so I’ll not comment on either.