In books X and XI of his Confessions, Augustine sets out to address the intriguing questions of memory and time respectively. His phenomenological and rigorous approach has attracted many subsequent commentators. Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) can also be taken as one of these, although Ricoeur's angle is decidedly distinct from that of Augustine – he can be said to represent a certain “hermeneutic rationality”. Using Ricoeur's material as a springboard, this article aims to examine both the possibility and place of collective memory (part I), as well as Ricoeur's response to Augustine's thought-provoking question “quid est enim tempus?” (part II). The first question could be entitled "between historical consciousness and collective memory". However, the investigation will start from memories that are above all as private as they are subjective. Ricoeur states in Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, in English 2004) that there is a “tradition of interiority” in the understanding of memory. He defines it by outlining three distinct characteristics: 1) "memory seems to be radically singular: my memories are not yours", 2) "it is in memory that the original link of consciousness with the past seems to reside" and 3) "it is at memory that is linked to the sense of orientation in the passage of time”. This (neo-)Platonic tradition is already powerful in the texts of its initiator, St. Augustine, but Ricoeur sees the tradition as truly gaining strength with Locke, Kant, and Husserl. While Augustine was unable to distinguish between identity, self, and memory, and did not even have the conceptual tools for a transcendental definition of the word “subject,” the modern sense of “interiority” is brought up with these later thinkers. Indeed,......middle of paper......of collective memory. It is through the function of support, correction and criticism of history that the sphere of collective memory appears in the first place. The dynamics of memories are contrasted with a petrified history, and they appear only in the light of this impersonal narrative that represents the “family history”, “the operational history of the Fukushima nuclear power plant”, or “the history of the 2011 Egyptian uprising”. ”. In this critical space opened by the history of a communicable whole it becomes possible to say that "I remember, because we have a common memory of this experience". This, however, leads to questions about the conception of time. Works Cited Barash, Jeffrey A. Barash, “Analyzing Collective Memory” in On Memory: an interdisciplinary approach, ed. Doron Mendels (Oxford-Bern-Berlin-Brussels-Frankfurt am Main-New York-Vienna: Peter Lang, 2007), 101-116.