[lit-ideas] "I" doesn't name a person
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:49:49 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 6/25/2012 6:35:25 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx quotes from Wittgenstein (or "Witters" if you must):
'"I" doesn't name a person, nor "here" a place,
and "this" is not a name..."
Oddly, I once read that back in England's West Country, a regional speaker
there was still using "itch" to mean "I" (cfr. German "ich").
For some reason, the "-tch" final sound to the English first-person
personal pronoun manage to get dropped, hence the shorther "I" (rather than
"itch" -- cfr. Wittgenstein's ""Ich" is not a name""). Note that the
consonantal
'-g' final sound is still there in Modern Greek ("ego") and Latin ('ego')
but not, alas, in Italian, where "io" is preferred.
It may be possible to call someone "Ich" -- EVEN in Germany (or Austria,
where Witters belonged).
So, Witters's reflection needs a caveat.
While "I" is usually NOT a name for a person -- or as he rather more
pedantically puts it, "I" does not name a person -- it may name a dog?
Incidentally, Witters's, Descartes's and Anscombe's confusions on "I" are
all well handled by Grice who wrote (a) "Descartes on clear and distinct
perception" (where he shed doubts, as R. Paul does, onto the validity of
Descartes 'cogito') and (b) "Personal Identity", excellently edited by J. Perry
in a book published by perhaps my favourite publishing house the world over
(after the Clarendon): "The University of California Press, at Berkeley".
Cheers,
Speranza
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
