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Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper “The First Person” has often been read as arguing that thinking is not a personal process. The thesis that “I” doesn’t refer to somebody would mean, on this view, that it is a kind of empty proper name : we should say “it thinks” rather than “I think.” Such a reading cannot be right since Anscombe does not question the fact that we are thinking the thoughts we express in the first person. What is at stake in her paper is not whether saying “I have a thought” is legitimate. Rather, it is whether self-consciousness is to be defined as the consciousness of an object, namely a self, i.e. an entity for which no criterion of identity can be provided other than a private one.