How to Cite
Abstract
The essay attempts to retrace the salient stages of Wittgenstein's thought on the grammar of the first person, starting from the 1930s until the age of Philosophical Investigations. However, the subsequent resumption of the critique of solipsism, outlined in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, involves a twofold distancing: on the one hand, with the abandonment of the no ownership theory ‒ that is the idea that psychic phenomena are structured according to the grammar of our language (metaphysical realism) ‒ and on the other, inversely, that the experience of self and of inner life is a projection of the pronoun “I” (idealism). The analysis of the self-reference of the first-person pronoun questions both the phenomenological relationship with the “own body” and the semantic relationship of first-person expressions with the internal sensations referable to our body. It follows a radical re-modulation of the semantic analysis of the so-called “intensional contexts” with respect to the deconstruction operated in the Tractatus, both through the development of the logical implications of the “Moore paradox”, and with the deepening of the asymmetry of the first and third person within those contexts, which makes it possible to grasp the difference between a grammatical person and a psychological person.