Cartesian Dualism
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Dualism has become so associated with RenT Descartes that it is usually referred to as Cartesian dualism, as if this were the defining approach to the issue. Dualism is the theory that the mind and the body, that mind and matter, are two distinct things. Descartes considered the issue of the location of the mind and found that the mind was separate from the body. He says that he is a subject of conscious thought and experience and thus cannot be nothing more than spatially extended matter. The mind, or the essential nature of the human being, cannot be material but must be non-material. This non-corporeal entity may be intimately associated with the body, but it is not itself a material entity as is the body. Descartes offered several arguments for this belief, one of which was the conceivability argument which necessarily involves a degree of tautology. Descartes says that the separate existence of the mind and body is conceivable and so is possible. If it is possible for two things to exist separately, he says, they cannot be identical. The mind is here conceiving of itself and holds that the mere fact that it can conceive of itself as existing separately from the body means that mind and body are two different things. The picture that Descartes created of the relationship between mind and body is one that has plagued philosophy ever since. It has also involved scientific inquiry as the argument is made as to whether the brain can be considered diffe
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t something which exists, and from it beliefs about the existence of other things can then be deduced (Lavine 93-95).
Self-evident propositions did not include ideas about the nature of things. Descartes said we could not deduce a priori the existence of particular physical things. We know that an object exists by experience, but to understand the true nature of the object it was necessary to apply the Cartesian method. To accomplish this, the philosopher first had to collect observations with which sense-experience supplies him. This information becomes the empirical data the philosopher then investigates, and the data are presupposed by the method. The philosopher would then try to deduce by analysis the character of the intermixture of simple natures which would be necessary to produce all those effects which the philosopher has seen to take place in connection with the object being examined. Once this is done, the philosopher can boldly assert that he has discovered the real nature of the physical object as far as human intelligence and the experimental observations will allow. The philosopher can then reverse the process and start with the simple natures and deduce the effects, which should be consistent with the effec
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Approximate Word count = 4096
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)
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