This essay contests the standard historical comparison that links Husserl’s account of time-consciousness to the tradition by way of Book XI of Augustine’sConfessions. This comparison rests on the mistaken assumption that both thinkers attribute the soul’s distention and corresponding apprehension of time to memory. While true for Augustine and Husserl’s 1905 lectures on time, Husserl concluded after 1907 that these lectures advanced the flawed and counter-intuitive position that memory extends perception. I will trace the shortcomings of Augustine’s and Husserl’s conflation of memory with perception. After developing Husserl’s maturely articulated distinction between memory and retention from 1911, I suggest chapters 10–14 of Aristotle’s Physics IV as a more apt anticipation of this second, more adequate half of the Husserlian story. A reconstruction of Aristotle’s definition of time as “the number of movement,” one that privileges the activity of “the mind pronouncing that the ‘nows’ are two,” intimates Husserl’s distinction between memory and retention. For Aristotle, the soul’s recognition of the ‘nows’ as two depends not on memory, but on the soul’s intentional activity of counting, itself dependent on the ability to, as Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics, “grasp mentally and [have] already grasped” at the same time.

Heidegger’s 1921 lecture course, “Augustine and Neo-Platonism,” shows the emergence of certain Augustinian elements in Heidegger’s account of the humanbeing. In Book X of Augustine’s Confessions, Heidegger finds a rich account of the historicity and facticity of human existence. He interprets Augustinianmolestia (facticity) by exhibiting the complex relation of curare (the fundamental character of factical life) and the three forms of tentatio (possibilities of falling).In this analysis, molestia appears as the how of the being of life. Heidegger also makes an important critique of what is Platonic in Augustine. Specifically, herejects what he calls Augustine’s axiological interpretation of tentatio for a more existential one. Heidegger understands axiology to be a calculative preferring ofone good over another in reference to a theoretical hierarchy of goods. We offer a defense of Augustine which focuses on the historical manner in which goods are disclosed in desire.

This essay presents an argument against human cloning. The thrust of the argument is that cloning is morally impermissible inasmuch as it violates thedignity of the clone who, as a person, is as yet an end in himself or herself. This violation of human dignity is made possible by a confusion between what Aristotledescribes as things that are “by nature” and things that are “by art.” By attempting to “make” a person, the technique of cloning superimposes the logic of artupon the domain of natural reproduction. Corresponding to the efficient, formal, and final causes in art are three specific ways in which the dignity of the clone isviolated. Notably, however, these same three violations of human dignity occur in the attitudes and practices of parents in natural reproduction, indicating that theproblem of cloning is but a symptom of a more deep-seated malaise.

The Ancient Mariner’s killing of the albatross is described by Coleridge as a great act of “inhospitality.” The central virtue dealt with in The Odyssey is hospitality.Religious traditions and cultures throughout the world prize hospitality as a major virtue. Philosophy, for some reason, has proven the exception. Hospitalityis missing from just about any philosopher’s list of virtues. Few discussions of ethics pay attention to it. This essay explores why hospitality has been so prominent in literature but ignored in philosophy. What Santayana called the “sedentary city mind,” typical of Modern thought, which replaced the medieval “pilgrim mind,”is seen as a key move leading philosophers to marginalize hospitality. The move to rehabilitate hospitality, I claim, can draw inspiration and sustenance from asurprising source: Jacques Derrida.