San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group

For this session we'll read Edward S. Casey's 1983 essay "Keeping the Past in Mind." Our recent readings have circled the problem of consciousness; here we shift to memory, and to a philosopher who treats remembering as a phenomenon deserving study in its own right rather than as a footnote to perception or a special case of time-consciousness.

Casey opens by attacking a dichotomy he thinks has quietly warped most theories of memory: the assumption that keeping something in mind must amount to either an entirely active affair or an utterly passive one. On the activist model, the mind reconstructs or even recreates what it remembers — a picture Casey traces from the Romantic idealists through the empirical work of Bartlett and Piaget, and one he finds echoed in more than one phase of phenomenology itself. On the passive model, the mind functions as a storehouse holding inert traces until something retrieves them. Casey rejects both horns and spends the essay working out what a third option might look like — what we actually do, or undergo, when we keep the past in mind.

For this session we'll read John Maynard Keynes's 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" alongside Scott Alexander's 2014 essay "Meditations on Moloch." Writing in the depths of the Great Depression, Keynes asks his readers to look a century ahead and imagine a world transformed by technological progress and capital accumulation. Eventually, he predicts, humanity may finally solve its "economic problem": satisfying our material needs will cease to occupy most of our lives, leaving us with the unfamiliar problem of deciding what to do with our newfound freedom.

Alexander offers a darker possibility. "Moloch" is his name for the competitive dynamics that can leave individuals, firms, and societies pursuing outcomes none of them actually want. A company that sacrifices profit for humane values may lose to one that doesn't; a nation that refuses an arms race may be dominated by one that participates. Read together, the essays ask whether technological progress can ever deliver the liberation Keynes imagined. If we become vastly richer, do we eventually get to stop optimizing and decide what our prosperity is for—or will competition simply absorb our newfound abundance and force us to keep running?