Wittgenstein on Persons and Human Beings

Abstract

The last part of Wittgenstein's Blue Book consists of a discussion of Solipsism. In the course of that discussion there occur several remarks (extending over about a page-and-a-half) which are explicitly concerned with the concept of a person and with the criteria of personal identity. This section is replaced in the Philosophical Investigations by half a sentence which reads: ‘… there is a great variety of criteria for personal “identity”’. Wittgenstein has italicised the word ‘identity’, and has placed it in inverted commas: I don't quite know why he does this, but it might be a hint to the effect that there is something slightly suspect about the notion of personal identity.