ABSTRACT
One of the stranger achievements of the anti-Cartesian tendency in contemporary philosophy of mind is to create a problem about the reference of the pronoun T. In place of a dualistic, self-centred psychology people are presented with a reductionist grammar of subjectivity in which there is no space for the Cartesian ego with the capacity to refer unfailingly to itself. Anscombe, Malcolm, and Canfield attempt to rid the term T of its Cartesian aura by emphasizing its linguistic function in such a way that it need not be understood to refer to anything as elusively metaphysical as a nonphysical self or mind. Strawson rejects the no-ownership or no-subject doctrine of the self which would argue that the idea of a subject of experience is replaceable by the idea of a body that happens to stand in a certain relationship to experiences. Foucault's observations on the formation of subjectivity have implications for any philosophy which places a value on first-person perspective.
