Abstract Buddhist egology concurs with the Husserlian claim that the enipirical ego is ?constituted?. The Buddhist ?deconstruction? of the ego will not, however, pace Husserl, permit the pronoun ?I? to refer to a purported extra?linguistic entity. The insights here distilled from the unique mode of self?reference functional within the Vietnamese language secure for us an unmistakable confirmation of the Buddhist thesis and have profound consequences for the philosophical problems surrounding the existence and nature of the self and the existence of (...) other minds. (shrink)

According to the received view, descriptivism is a dead end in an attempt to account for singular reference by proper names, indexicals and possibly even incomplete descriptions, for they require referentialism. In contrast to this, I argue for an application of the former to all kinds of singular terms, indexicals in particular, by relying on a view of incomplete descriptions as elliptical in a pragmatic sense. I thus provide a general analysis of singular reference. The proposed approach is in line (...) with the classical theory of propositions, except for admitting “private” ones with subjective mental entities as constituents. On the other hand, there is no commitment to singular Russellian propositions with ordinary objects as constituents and in general to meanings that cannot be “in the mind”. (shrink)