ABSTRACT
Philosophers have long pondered the nature of the self, their judgments concerning its existence and identity ranging from outright nihilism-its dismissal as a sheer illusion-to affi rmations of its absolute centrality to the whole of reality and our knowledge of it. This enormous variety of opinions makes one wonder if all these philosophers can really have meant the same in speaking of ‘selves’—a term which is, in any case, hardly in widespread everyday use. And yet all such talk is centered ultimately upon a linguistic phenomenon that is ubiquitous: the fi rst-person pronoun, ‘I’—a term which always seems to have a perfectly defi nite and indisputably real reference whenever it is employed, referring as it does to whomsoever or whatsoever is uttering it on any occasion of its use. But for all its ubiquity and seeming familiarity, this pronoun occasions some of the most puzzling problems in metaphysics and philosophical psychology that we ever encounter. The most challenging of these problems is the topic of the present chapter.
