Cogito Ergo Sum: Christopher Peacocke and John Campbell: II-Lichtenberg and the Cogito

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-9264.2012.00341.x

ISSN

1467-9264

Autores

John Campbell,

Tópico(s)

Free Will and Agency

Resumo

Our use of ‘I’, or something like it, is implicated in our self-regarding emotions, in the concern to survive, and so seems basic to ordinary human life. But why does that pattern of use require a referring term? Don't Lichtenberg's formulations show how we could have our ordinary pattern of use here without the first person? I argue that what explains our compulsion to regard the first person as a referring term is our ordinary causal thinking, which requires us to find a persisting object as the mechanism that underpins the causal structure we naturally ascribe to the self. I thus argue against Peacocke's picture (2012), on which it's the cogito that explains one's knowledge of one's own existence.

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