Draft Hoerl Vs Craver It seems to me that Christoph Hoerl and Carl Craver are taking two sides to the same side of the fence. Carl Craver and Christoph Hoerl are concerned with the nature of temporal orientation in the sense of a being’s ability to tie its identity to its past, present, and future. Concerned with a more stringent set of criteria for what constitutes a sense of time, Hoerl claims that people who lack an episodic memory cannot grasp a sense of time in a way that more “normal” individuals can. Craver, accepts that amnesiac individuals may lack an episodic memory, but sets out to systematically refute the notion of this type of memory as a requirement for being an agent. I believe that the definition for episodic memory is far less constraining than either of these two philosophers are willing to give. I suggest that on an individual level, time and memory are interdependent and only if memory is completely nonexistent, will a person be relieved of their identification as an agent. Given this, Craver’s defense of amnesiac persons hold true, and further, these people indeed do hold a sense of time. Craver takes several angles from which to refute the absence of agency in amnesiacs. First Craver takes Locke’s diachronic view of identity and discusses the requirements for what constitutes a memory. These are: a) The person has an apparent memory of an experience, b) The content of the apparent memory is identical (or very similar) to the past experience c) The person in fact had that experience.
Craver uses a follow-up system in which C is altered to allow for the memories to be based on the emotion elicited from a past event to count as quasi-memories, however, I believe that memory does not need to be based even so far as this to count as an example of diachronic memory. Take for instance the case of Holly Ramona, a girl who came to