Southwest Philosophy Review

Volume 39, Issue 1, January 2023

Rilkean Memory, Epistemic Injustice, and Epistemic Violence

Mark Rowlands develops a novel account of remembering in which episodic memories survive in a mutated form after their content has been long forgotten. He dubs this account “Rilkean memories.” I draw from this account to argue that episodic memories of past epistemic harms resulting from Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice, can persist as embodied behavioral or bodily dispositions that have negative epistemic and practical consequences long after these episodic memories have been forgotten. The way that others judge us as epistemic agents—as people with the capacity to know or the ability to contribute to the pool of knowledge—and following this judgment, treat or fail to treat us as epistemic agents can cause us to adopt attitudes or behaviors with consequences to our epistemic agency. When embodied as Rilkean memories, these attitudes or behaviors raise new difficulties and become quite difficult to eradicate.