> so let me ask, and not to be smart:
> where and what is the self? the individual? the person? the mind?
> rationality? irrationality? doubt? faith?
I have snipped part of the list, so let me say that some things on it I would indeed deny the existence of (e.g., literature). The items left make up a somewhat motley crew. Let me say (perhaps to amplify later) that *if* I were to use any of them in a particular discourse I would try to define it historically. One of the above, "the individual," I would deny the existence of. A stone can be an individual, as can a beetle, a planet, a molecule, probably a frog, and with increasing uncertainty as we name so-called "higher animals." Chimpanzees seem *almost* certainly not individuals. (Someone suffering from Alzeimer's disease is becoming a mere individual.) Whenever and whereever we find ourselves we are always already caught up in an ensemble of social relations -- i.e., we do not *have* a history, as an individual would-- but *are* our history.
I don't use "mind" or use it cautiously. I suppose it is the intersection of neurology with history (politics)
With "person" I would probably be sloppily nominalist. That is the name we give one of those intersecting histories that make up the human species. I seldom have occasion to use "self," so I won't try to define it. Rationality and irrationality are of course relationships and have no meaning in abstraction from particular complexes of relations.
But I have to leave to attend the 50th wedding anniversary of a couple of friends.
Carrol