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Cartesian Dualism

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. Descartes finds that he might doubt everything else because his senses may deceive him. He can thus deny that he has a body and senses because he perceives these things only through what he has called the senses, and all this data might be false. He asks then if it is possible that he can exist without the body and without the senses, and of course he can because the one thing he knows without the senses is that he exists. He exists in his mind, and he knows t...

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Cartesian Dualism. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:10, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702224.html