Abstract

Consensus identifies an underlying continuity to Wittgenstein's treatment of the self and 'I', despite certain obvious surface variations and revisions. Almost all Wittgenstein's arguments and observations concerning 'I' and the self in the Tractatus are arranged as attempts to explicate. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world, not a part of it. The picture that forms around the consensus view is certainly enlightening about Wittgenstein on 'I' and the self, but this is so because rather than in spite of the difficulties we face in making it match. Contrary to the consensus view, there is little or no 'denigrating' of the first person in his thought, whether of the reductionist or eliminativist kind, and where it may be manifest limited uses only, and by contrast with the general case.