Abstract

 In a lecture rendered in 2007, John Perry focuses on the short story “Borges and I”, by Jorge Luis Borges, as a means to deal with an issue belonging to the domains of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of action, uniting semantic theses on indexical terms to epistemic and metaphysical theses on self-knowledge and on the nature of personal identity. Perry proposes two rival interpretations for Borges’ story, offering reasons in favor of the second one. This paper investigates which consequences would follow for our comprehension of the concept of action if none of the two interpretations proposed by Perry were acceptable.

Keywords: Perry, theory of action, fiction, personal identity.