autobiography: childhood, memory and forgetting from a philosophical perspective

Abstract

Childhood, with the passage of time, becomes an obscure passage of our lives. Our main ally to reach it, memory, often fails us, and when we look back we find stories that we cannot precisely place in time, or yet, sometimes, we cannot precisely tell if we've lived them or not; they may well be made-up thoughts, something that someone else once told us or lived, or even something we saw on television or read. At first sight, it seems there is little we can tell about our own childhood, for apparently no one can access memories of it; nor can we aspire to get more than a couple of fleeting images. Even with all this difficulties, we face our pasts constantly and live in a permanent relationship with our memories, which, being diffuse or not, we strive to retain in many ways, there being those who even venture to capture on paper the little they know. This work intends to talk about childhood from childhood itself, having autobiographies as an object and trying to get into the purposes and reasons that motivate people to write an autobiography of their childhoods, as well as the meanings they acquire due to the tension between memory and fiction. To carry out such a task we will sail among the voices of different philosophers who have referred to autobiography and fiction. Also, in the end, we will pick three autobiographical texts as an object of study.