...The correspondence between philosopher René Descartes and the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia from 1643 to 1649 give incredible insight not only into the person of René Descartes but the intricacies of his philosophical views, particularly as a critical review of his substance dualism. The core tenants of Cartesian dualism are (in brief) that; 1) There exists only two distinct types of substance; material substances (of the body and the physical realm – that is extended spatially) and immaterial substances (that make up the mind, rationality and the soul.) 2) In relation to the body – Descartes is a mechanist; such that the body operates like a machine, according to internal laws, reactivity to external stimuli. The soul or mind is capable of diverting these automated principles; such that we see the distinction between human reason and action, and the behaviour of animals....
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...4.1. The first Philosopher who tried to answer this problem and solve them was Rene Descartes. Based from Principia Philosophiae (2.002). He proposed the Cartesian Dualism theory. He said that human Consciousness lies within an immaterial and material domain. 4.1.1. res cogitans (the realm of thought). Descartes is famously known for his words “I think therefore I am”. 4.1.2. res extensa (the realm of extension). This is known as the domain of physical or material things. 4.2. Although the proposal of Descartes has been widely accepted by many philosophers. There are some who do not agree and they are known as the monist. They believe that a variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality or substance. 4.2.1. Physicallism...
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...In order to adequately address the problem of free will, we must first discuss the mind body problem. Generally, humans throughout history have believed the mind and body to be two separate entities. This idea, also known as Cartesian dualism, promotes the notion of an uncaused mind or soul that exists free from the constraints of the natural world. Before the discovery of neural networking, this dualism seemed like the common sense view. It sure does seem like there is some sort of separate “mind” that controls what we do and creates thoughts that appear to have no physical properties. However, the whole point of philosophy is to question our previous notions of common sense and to review controversies objectively, utilizing the new evidence at hand. Using this...
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...Blackburn’s “Think” Are experiences through senses and experiences in the mind independent? Simon Blackburn attempts to answer this question by first explaining the “Zombie and Mutant Possibilities.”(pg. 52) The Zombie Possibility proposes that people may look and behave like ones-self but are not conscious. The Mutant Possibility proposes that there are people who look and behave like oneself and are conscious, but do not interpret feelings or senses the same way that you do. The idea being proposed is that if the mind can live on without the body then the body can live on without a mind. The body would still respond to things the way one with a conscious mind would but it would not be aware of its own existence. This idea is called Cartesian...
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...There is a major debate in philosophy called the mind and body debate. This is the debate about what gives us our personal identity as to whether it is our minds, our bodies or whether it is both. A number of philosophers have commented on the mind and body debate. These are dualists, monists and materialists all of which have theories explaining what gives us our personal identity. Dualists believe that the mind and body are separate, monists believe that the mind and body are one but can be separated and materialism is the view that there is no such thing as a mind or a soul and that when we die we die. Philosophers such as Plato and Descartes are dualists. In this dualist argument, Plato presents four arguments for the immortality of the soul which are cyclical – everything comes into existence from its opposite which sets up the cycle of birth and death, recollection- Plato believed that the knowledge we acquire is not learnt but remembered or recollected. Plato believed that the soul existed in a realm of forms before coming into the body, where it acquires this knowledge. As evidence of this he cites the slave boy who has no education but can grasp complex mathematical concepts just like the film ‘Good will hunting’, Affinity – Plato believed that the body has an affinity with the earth and that the soul has the affinity with the eternal real of forms. Because the soul is composite, at death it is dispersed at death and so it returns to the real of form to which it has...
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...Question No. 1 Answer: John Searle has attempted to stake out a center position in the middle of materialism and property dualism, which he calls biological naturalism. John Searle fundamentally rejects dualism and contends that the conventional mind-body issue has a 'basic arrangement': mental wonders are both brought on by biological procedures in the brain and are themselves components of the brain. All the more accurately, mental states and occasions are macro-properties of neurons similarly that solidity and liquidity are macro-properties of molecules. Searle is likewise right to deny the name property-dualism on the off chance that it conveys ramifications of backing for specific principles of reflection, advantaged access, or internal...
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... 2004). Descartes: Well young man, let me explain a few things that will support my premise in a substantial way that may indeed change your position. First of all, the mind can exist without the present of the body. You see John; the existence of my body is dubitable whereas my mind is not. Therefore my mind does not consist of the same properties of my body. This is a clear distinction that my mind is separate from my body. John: Mr. Descartes, we can agree to disagree with some matters of the mind and body. I am troubled that many people think that they have a mind or soul and a body. I am also concerned that some people think they have all three. (Searle, 2004). Western Philosophers are often portraying some type of dualism and people have accepted this theory for many years. Descartes: And rightfully so Mr....
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...Judeo-Christian ideas on the soul. The main argument I'm using to examine us being 'basically physical beings' is dualism and the connection between the mind, body and the soul. One of the first recorded forms of dualism was platonic dualism. Plato (429-347 BCE) believed that the body was physical and is rooted in the four dimensions of space and time which is subject to change, he called this the 'sarx'. But a 'being' also had another part, a soul, which existed in the world of forms and was made up of three distinct elements; reason, emotion and appetite. These three instincts in Plato’s view are what animates us. This therefore makes us not just physical beings. Plato though, saw the soul as pure or 'simple' and therefore the body was inferior something which trapped the soul until death. Plato appears to believe that the soul will be reborn in a new body after that. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) at the time also agreed that we had a 'soul'. But he believed that the body and soul were inseparable, this is the earlier monist ideas. Due to the soul and body not being able to separate this mean that the idea did not allow the soul to survive death. Aristotle did rethink this at times wondering if we did have non-physical elements to us, but it's not likely since he believed people couldn't live after death in any sense. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 CE) was one of the first to integrate dualism into Christianity. Aquinas mainly followed Aristotle's view and believed that the body and soul were...
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...assess dualism as a theory of the relation of mind and body. Human beings are material objects. However, unlike other material objects (e.g. non-living things) humans have the ability to form judgements and reason their existence. Meaning to say that, human beings have 'minds'. In general, humans are characterised as having both a mind and body. By definition, mind is referred to the mental processes, thought and consciousness whereas body is referred to the physical aspects of the brain-neurons and how the brain is structured. This is known as dualism. In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental (mind) and the physical (body) are both real or exist, but both of them are different kinds of thing. The theory of mind-body dualism is presented by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who holds that both mind and body are substances, in which the body is a material substance as it is extended in space whereas the mind is an unextended in space, and so called spiritual substance. According to Descartes, he believed that mind and body actually can interact through the pineal gland in the brain. In Descartes’s first principle of philosophy, “I think, therefore I am”, makes mind more certain than matter. It also showed that the mind which is a thinking thing can exist apart from its extended body. Hence, Descartes said that the mind is a substance that is different from the body (a substance whose essence is thought). This became known as “Substance Dualism” (view...
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...FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OYE-EKITI, EKITI STATE, NIGERIA. A TERM PAPER TITLE:- “THE ESSENCE/SUBSTANCE OF MAN” BY FACULTY: SCIENCE DEPARTMENT: MICROBIOLOGY COURSE TITLE: PHILOSOPHY AND LOGIC COURSE CODE: GST 205 CONTENT * Introduction * What is man * Philosophically * Scientifically * The essence and substance of man * What constitute man * Man as a dualist * Man as a monad * Man as a socialist * Man as a spiritual entity * Man as a physical entity * Intrinsic characteristics that man have in common * Illustration of the mental essence(when man is abnormal is he still half or full) INTRODUCTION The essence of man is the constituent of man which goes beyond his body alone but extends to his mind, soul, spirit and other attributes of man. But we cannot talk about the essence of man without the existence of man because without an existence of man, man’s essence is of no use and nothing to talk about. This brings about the proposition ‘existence precedes essence’. The proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being). To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. By posing the acts that constitute...
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...Social Sciences and Humanities prof. Coleridge Chris Final essay “Brain vs Mind” [pic] Alessandro Acquaviva E060478 INDEX The Mind-Brain Problem 3 Background of the problem 4 Evaluating the three proposed solutions 6 Weak Dualism 7 Strong Dualism 9 The relevance of Parapsychology 11 Conclusions 12 The Mind-Brain Problem The mind-brain problem raises the question as to whether the mind is no more than the idle side-effect of our brain processes or whether the mind can, in some degree, influence behaviour. Here we rehearse the arguments on both sides plus some recent attempts to eliminate mind altogether. However contentious, the philosophical problem, as distinct from the physiological problem, can be stated quite simply as follows: What, essentially, is the relationship between events in the brain and those private, subjective experiences that together constitute our inner mental life? We need not assume here that consciousness is synonymous with mind - consciousness may well be no more than just one aspect of mind - but, with respect to the problem at issue, it is the existence of consciousness that is critical. Stated thus, the problem admits of only three basic answers: 1) Events in the brain, operating in accordance with the laws of physics, determine completely both our behaviour and our subjective experiences. 2) Mental events may be elicited by events in the brain or they may, in turn, elicit brain events and so influence...
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...Mind; there is flora and there is fauna; there are things that we can modify and things that humans have no control over. One of the many ways to differentiate and classify everything and anything in the surrounding environment and, probably, one of the most universal ways, is to classify things as being either material or immaterial. It seems fairly easy to distinguish between the two. If we cannot touch, feel or see something, then it becomes the notion of the immaterial world. The rest belongs to the material things, which we can own, trade, purchase, possess, lose or give away. When Rene Descartes, one of the founders of the modern-day western philosophical science, laid the groundwork for his epistemological perspective called Cartesian Dualism, he was coming exactly from the same universal idea. The thoughts and hypotheses that Descartes tried so hard, throughout his lifetime’s work, to develop into axioms and prove to be fundamentally true, surprisingly remain highly debatable and are still largely in question. Philosophy is very much about the question of certainty. To a great extent, from the epistemological perspective, knowledge is certainty (Harris, 2009). Just as the case is with Plato, whose quest for certainty has driven his metaphysics to take it, as a prerequisite, that if something is known, then it cannot change (Frank et al., 2011), Descartes too attempted to deduce the formula that would be true for all cases. However, while for Plato, it was the Form that...
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...Materialism: The view that only the material world (matter) is truly real, and that all processes and realities observed in the universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components, e.g., atoms, molecules Dualism: The view that the world consists of or is explicable as two fundamental entities, such as mind and matter. Eliminative Materialism: Eliminative materialism is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist. Support Reductive Materialism Michael Tye * Proposes that understanding something is not the same as knowing something. * “Understanding what something is is not the same as knowing what it is like to experience that thing.” * The reductive materialist claims that after an adequate explanation of the reduction, the dualist will see that there is a sense in which the mental state is the material state. * Reductive materialism holds that we do have “mental state”, which are the actual experiences themselves, the sensations that are presented to us, whether they be sights, sounds, feelings, tactile sensations, or the woman in red. Dualism The mental state is not identical to the brain state. Paul Churchland * Proposes that...
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...PHI130 10-17-2011 Abstract In the present paper, the issue of mind is discussed in the framework of mind/body problem. While in the times of Aristotle and Plato it was named differently and explained through objects materiality and soul divinity, the modern perception of the same correlation was emphasized by Descartes as body/mind problem. In the present paper, the essence of the problem is outlined in the context of one of the modern philosophies of mind, meaning physicalism. The main aims of this essay is to identify the corner stone of physicalist concept, its main supporting and opposing arguments, and distinguish which position is the strongest one and understand the reason why. Key words: physicalism, body/mind problem, knowledge, exclusion, consciousness. What is mind? In the history of human thought, there were various dilemmas which the brightest minds of their times were trying to solve and which remained enigmas until our times. The mind/body problem is one of those issues. While, in times of Aristotle and Plato, it was named differently and explained through the objects materiality and soul divinity, the modern perception of the same correlation was shaped by Descartes as body/mind problem. In the present paper, the essence of the problem is explained in the context of one of the modern philosophies of mind, meaning physicalism. The main aims of this essay is to identify the corner stone of physicalist concept, its main supporting and opposing arguments...
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...Distinction One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct–a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. This argument gives rise to the famous problem of mind-body causal interaction still debated today: how can the mind cause some of our bodily limbs to move (for example, raising one’s hand to ask a question), and how can the body’s sense organs cause sensations in the mind when their natures are completely different? This article examines these issues as well as Descartes’ own response to this problem through his brief remarks on how the mind is united with the body to form a human being. This will show how these issues arise because of a misconception about Descartes’ theory of mind-body union, and how the correct conception of their union avoids this version of the problem. The article begins with an examination of the term “real distinction” and of Descartes’ probable motivations for maintaining his dualist thesis. Table of Contents 1. What is a Real Distinction? 2. Why a Real Distinction? 1. The Religious Motivation 2. The Scientific Motivation 3. The Real Distinction Argument 3. The First Version ...
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