Thank Heaven, Fadage, you caught me in a misspelling - a misleading misspelling. I am sorry that I misled you. How foolish of me to expect you to think that my "Whittgenstein" was Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 1951), the famous semanticist. Forgive me.

Hey! I think I'd best give you a little hint least you miss my little joke entirely...




More particularly, Flew’s paper tells a strange story of Wittgenstein’s being invited to reply to a paper by an undergraduate, Oscar Wood, at the Jowett Society in 1947, and saying nothing about the paper’s subject, "Cogito ergo sum", until Pritchard asked him about it directly: whereupon he [Wittgenstein] replied "Cogito ergo sum. That’s a very peculiar sentence", pointing to his own head at the words "cogito" and "sum". Flew, at the meeting, thought this "perverse but no doubt entirely characteristic", but in later years "realised that, by thus reminding his audience that the referents of the token-reflexive word ‘I’ are the flesh and blood people who utter it to refer to themselves, Wittgenstein might have been suggesting a radical and totally devastating objection to the position which Descartes had reached in the second paragraph of Part IV of his Discourse on the Method. For it is simply false to maintain that the referent of this word is an incorporeal and yet substantial subject of consciousnes."

__Taken from--> "Russell, Wittgenstein and Cogito ergo sum", remarks on a paper by Antony Flew presented in Washington DC on the 25th of March, 2000

There.