What is a self, and what it is to be a person? We can
make sense of our selves as devices, overlaid on the human animals
that we are, that solve a cluster of related problems, having to do
with what it takes to draw conclusions, and to compensate for our
propensity to overlook the reasons to balk at drawing them. That is,
being configured as persons enables us to infer, to reason, and more
broadly, to figure things out. But that remarkable life hack is
threatened by the division of intellectual and evaluative labor; the
flip side of specialization is ignorance of everything it's not your
business to know, and the rapidly-growing pool of what there is to
overlook is well on the way to swamping the capacities of the device
-- that is, of what makes us ourselves.
Plato: Two Conceptions of Philosophy in the
Charmides
Appendix: The Ion: Why Plato Can't Be Your AOS
Descartes: Starting from Scratch, All By Yourself
Hume: His Unnoticed Insight
Whewell: Mill's and Whewell's Competing
Conceptions of Logic (published in
A. Loizides, Mill's A System of Logic: Critical
Appraisals (New York: Routledge, 2014): 101-21)