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. The one thing that cannot be doubted and that is true each time it is expressed by a person is that that person exists.
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e reason has already persuaded me that I ought to withhold belief no less carefully from things not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me manifestly false, I shall be justified in setting all of them aside, if in each case I can find any ground whatsoever for regarding them as dubitable (Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations 95).
Descartes uses as an example what happens when he is asleep. He says that what the insane represent to themselves when they are awake he may represent to himself when he is asleep because dreams are often improbable. This fact raises issues about the validity of the senses, for when Descartes is asleep, he may have dreamed precisely that he is sitting in front of this fire in just the same pose. When he is, he is beset by the illusion that what he senses is real, when in fact it is a dream. How is it possible to tell the difference? Descartes finds that he is uncertain now whether he is awake or dreaming, and so the experience of the senses has to be doubted because it is indistinguishable at the time from the dreaming state. Descartes suggests that we pretend we are asleep and accept that all that we sense is false and illusory. He says that we must agr
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Approximate Word count = 1744
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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