Sven Bernecker is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series A leading philosopher of memory, Bernecker will explore the memory conditions of responsibility in his Oct. 22 lecture.

Mudd Center for Ethics
October 13, 2026

Sven Bernecker, Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, will deliver a lecture at 5:15 p.m. on Oct. 22 in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons as part of the Washington and Lee University Roger Mudd Center for Ethics’ series, “Memory, Mind and Morality.”

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Carrying the Blame: The Memory Conditions of Responsibility Over Time.”

Widely recognized as one of the leading contemporary philosophers of memory, Bernecker’s work examines memory as a complex epistemic and ethical phenomenon. His research explores the value of memory, different forms of remembering and forgetting and the epistemic and moral responsibilities with how we remember — and forget — the past.

“Having Dr. Bernecker with us for the Mudd Center’s series on memory is a real privilege,” said Melissa Kerin, director of the Mudd Center and professor of art history. “His talk will provide a valuable conceptual anchor for the series, helping us contextualize the preceding lectures and providing a framework to return to throughout the year.”

In his talk, Bernecker will explore the intersection of blame and memory, starting from the notion that holding someone responsible for a past deed may require that they, in some sense, still remember it. Theories of personal identity since the Enlightenment lean on episodic, autonoetic memory, or recalling the act from the inside; but the central question becomes whether blameworthiness relies on this “inside” recollection or can persist through a different kind of memory, outlasting our capacity to recall what we did.

“Dr. Bernecker advances the field by bringing questions of memory into dialogue with ethics and responsibility, which extends the conversation beyond the traditional framework of epistemology (the theory of knowledge),” Kerin said. “His work has implications not only for philosophy, but also for social and collective memory, neuro-ethics and the ethical challenges posed by AI technologies.”

In addition to his faculty position at UC Irvine, Bernecker is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Cologne and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg’s African Institute for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. He specializes in epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysis and the philosophy of memory. Bernecker is the author of “The Metaphysics of Memory” and “Memory: A Philosophical Study” and co-edited “The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory,” a major reference work in the field.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the Mudd Center for Ethics’ series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series themes have included “Global Ethics in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Race and Justice in America,” “The Ethics of Citizenship,” “Markets and Morals,” “Equality and Difference,” “The Ethics of Identity,” “The Ethics of Technology,” “Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World, “Beneficence: Practicing and Ethics of Care,” “The Ethics of Design,” “How We Live and Die: Stories, Values and Communities” and “Taking Place: Land Use and Environmental Ethics.”