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Letters
Letters
I See I • Mary Midgley, Human Being • Inveigled by Hegel? • Technology vs Progress • Mathematics vs Pascal • No Capital Letter • (No) Opium for the Masses? • Eradicating Vulnerabilities • No Christianity & Homosexuality
I See I
Dear Editor: In PN Issue 141, Raymond Tallis shows that it is relatively easy to argue against solipsism, the claim that I am the only experiencing subject, while all you others are zombies or illusions.
What has troubled many, though, is why the temptation to solipsism exists, and why some have been led in that direction. In The Blue Book Ludwig Wittgenstein points to the different uses of ‘I’ – one use refering to I on a level with others, where we all have objectively identifiable properties; the other use referring to the ‘neighbourless’ subject of my experiences. The trouble for Wittgenstein is, the subject being neighbourless, we cannot use our public language. In a series of lectures on solipsism in 1969, Prof.
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