2008-2-PHI130.Essay.2

PHI 130 Essay 2

Write a 1500 word essay. Draw on the relevant readings from the unit and on the material discussed in lectures. Include your own thoughts and/or responses to the readings and lecture material.

Topic: Cartesian Dualism

Why, according to Descartes, must we understand mind and matter (body) as different substances? Explain and evaluate the reasons he uses to defend this position, and compare it to the physicalist account of the relationship between mind and body (taken from the Nagel or Churchland articles in your Reader). Clearly state which account you think is best and explain why.

Why, according to Descartes, must we understand mind and matter (body) as different substances?

Descartes holds that mind and matter are two distinct substances (Descartes 1641). If he'd used precisely those words, and said no more, there would be a way to find his conclusion true under interpretation, especially if he'd deigned to declare it simply as axiomatic. Alas, he expounded on this simplified expression of his idea and in his effort to demonstrate just cause betrayed his view as confused, indefensible, and ultimately irreconcilable with a consistent and positivist account of reality as was ostensibly his aim. Particularly, his attempt to find distinction in the necessarily opaque realm of substance is unfounded, and of essence an abuse of language.

Descartes was a Frenchman, living from 1596 to 1650, in a place and time where philosophical inquiry had been heavily dominated by the scholasticism of the Catholic church. Descartes was schooled by Jesuits, and demonstrated a marked tendency throughout his life to foster good relations with the church (Williams 1978). In such alignment the object of his salient work -- Meditationes de prima philosophia, as originally published in 1641 in Latin -- was primarily to set out a proof for the existence of God, and for the immortality of the human soul: in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur.

As is typical of modern philosophy, the founder of which Descartes himself is held to be, the social process of legitimation demands claims to knowledge to be codified and presented as rigorous "logical" formulations given to inhere in a vast smattering of words, thus his Meditations. Masked in his impressive and complicated verbiage is his case for mind/body dualism. In presenting his case Descartes invokes two arguments, so called: the 'indubitable' argument, and the 'self-knowledge' argument.

Indubitable means: beyond doubt. Descartes finds that where he is able to doubt his body, he is unable to doubt his mind. According to Descartes this is because 'doubting' requires the 'doubter'; that is, the mind. Where by his intuitive conceptions the body is allocated the property of being doubtful, and the mind the property of being beyond doubt, by Leibniz's Law concerning the identity of indiscernibles this ontological incompatibility is held to give rise to a proof of distinctness.

While one might be inclined to think that conceptions being distinct does not by necessity imply they are substantive, or where one might believe that the referent of the term "substantive" is that which "stands under" the observable in the universe, Descartes would contradict such a conception of these very terms and lay claim to knowledge of diversity in the substantive realm: "we are necessitated to conclude, that all those objects which are clearly and distinctly conceived to be diverse substances, as mind and body, are substances really reciprocally distinct."

The 'self-knowledge' argument

References

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy.

Williams, B. (2005). Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. USA and Canada: Routledge.

Notes

Descartes argues the category error that as "he knows only that he is thinking" he knows that "he is only thought". As he takes his identity to be his mind, and as he does not deny the possibility of the body (though the body might be a deception), he concludes that the mind is a primitive conception (substance) of a different kind to the body (also substance).

To answer the first question, look at what Descartes actually says in his meditation. Then look at interpretations in the lecture notes and in Churchland.

Then enumerate the objections he published with his rejoinder. That is to answer the second question.

My position: they're meta-circular. The mind emerges from physicality, but in turn the mind conceives everything, even physicality, as objects of the mind. This quandary is a consequence of the system that both empiricism and rationalism hold in common: that of objectification o experience.