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G.E.M. Anscombe
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Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 10 facts
claimG.E.M. Anscombe's argument that "I" does not function like a demonstrative is reminiscent of Avicenna's Flying Man argument.
claimG.E.M. Anscombe posits that a subject in a sensory deprivation tank who is anaesthetized and suffering from amnesia could still think "I-thoughts" (e.g., "How did I get into this mess?"), which she uses to argue that "I" cannot mean "this person" because demonstratives require the object to be presented to conscious awareness.
claimGareth Evans argues that the problem with G.E.M. Anscombe's argument against the demonstrative model of "I" is that it fails to recognize that "I" can be modeled on "here" rather than "this".
claimThe fact that certain first-person thoughts are 'identification-free'—meaning they depend for their reference on no identification of oneself as a publicly presented object—contributes to the philosophical idea that these thoughts pick out a private object, such as a soul. This concept is connected to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument for the non-referential character of 'I'.
claimG.E.M. Anscombe argues that the first-person pronoun "I" cannot be understood as a proper name, a demonstrative, or an abbreviation of a definite description because each of these models requires a "conception" to reach its referent, and no such conception can be specified for "I" without either failing to guarantee reference or implying the existence of an immaterial soul.
referenceLudwig Wittgenstein authored the book 'Philosophical Investigations', published in 1953 with a translation by G.E.M. Anscombe by Blackwell in Oxford.
claimLucy O'Brien analyzed the self-reference rule in relation to G.E.M. Anscombe in her 1994 article 'Anscombe and the Self-Reference Rule' published in Analysis.
claimG.E.M. Anscombe argues that "I" is not a referring expression because it does not function like a proper name, demonstrative, or definite description, and there is independent reason to believe immaterial souls do not exist.
claimThe view that non-conceptual self-consciousness is a necessary condition of the unity of consciousness is vulnerable to the objection that it implausibly rules out cases like the subject in a sensory deprivation tank described by G.E.M. Anscombe in 1975, where forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness are absent.
referenceMichael J. White replied to G.E.M. Anscombe and Thompson Clarke regarding the first-person pronoun in his 1979 article 'The First Person Pronoun: A Reply to Anscombe and Clarke' published in Analysis.
Social Epistemology – Introduction to Philosophy - Rebus Press press.rebus.community 1 fact
referenceG. E. M. Anscombe authored the essay 'What is it to Believe Someone?', which was published in the 2008 collection 'Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics'.