According to a basic dualistic conception that originated in Descartes, minds are immaterial, non-spatial and simple thinking particulars that are independent of anything material. Call this view the Cartesian conception, and minds thus conceived, Cartesian minds. In what follows I propose a new version of an argument against the Cartesian conception that can be traced back to Descartes" days (Garber and Ayers 1998, 232). The inspiration behind my version is an argument suggested by Strawson"s seminal discussion of (...) the concept of a person (1959, Chaps. 3-4). However, in both form and substance my argument takes its own course. (shrink)

In Kagaku no Sekai to Kokoro no Tetsugaku, Mr.Michio Kobayashi features on Descartes' theory of minds as "subjecitive-active consciousness", and defends it against the materialist movement. I show that Kobayashi's method has a difficulty for defending existence of our minds because Descartes didn't allow the scientific investigation of our mental experience from outside,and so cannot appropriately grasp the significance of other minds.

What did Leibniz have to contribute to the philosophy of mind? To judge from textbooks in the philosophy of mind, and even Leibniz commentaries, the answer is: not much. That may be because Leibniz’s philosophy of mind looks roughly like a Cartesian philosophy of mind. Like Descartes and his followers, Leibniz claims that the mind is immaterial and immortal; that it is a thinking thing ; that it is a different kind of thing from (...) body and obeys its own laws; and that it comes stocked with innate truth-tracking intellectual ideas and an epistemically troubling habit of forming confused sensory ideas on the occasion of external corporeal events. Nothing is new. Of course, Leibniz adds unconscious perceptions to the mind in the form of his famous petites perceptions, and he offers a unique solution to the problem of mind-body interaction in the form of his infamous pre-established harmony. In the overall scheme of things, however, these look like minor alterations in a philosophy of mind that the Cartesians had been advocating for some fifty years. Or so it appears. (shrink)

This chapter is a re-consideration of the powerful set of objections to the Cartesian theory of mind that Princess Elisabeth offered in her 1643–49 correspondence with Descartes. Much of the scholarly discussion of this correspondence has focused on Elisabeth’s initial criticisms of Descartes’ views of mind–body interaction and union, and has presented these criticisms as assuming the general principle that objects with heterogeneous natures cannot interact. However, this account of the criticisms fails to capture not only their (...) basic import, but also their connections to Elisabeth’s remarks later in the correspondence regarding both the ability of rational deliberation to lead us to happiness, and the freedom of our will from determining conditions. The attempt here is to offer a new account of Elisabeth’s objections to Cartesian interaction that serves to relate them to her critical evaluation of Descartes’ views of happiness and freedom. Such an account leads us to see Elisabeth as challenging Descartes throughout to take seriously the extent to which our mind is not merely a rational thinking thing, but also something that is profoundly conditioned by the passions that it receives from the body. (shrink)

In recent years there has been increasing interest in two relatively unknown French Cartesians, Robert Desgabets and his disciple Pierre-Sylvain Régis.1 The attention is well deserved because their...

This paper argues that a Cartesian belief in the self-transparency of minds might actually be an innate aspect of our mind-reading faculty. But it acknowledges that some crucial evidence needed to establish this claim hasn’t been looked for or collected. What we require is evidence that a belief in the self-transparency of mind is universal to the human species. The paper closes with a call to anthropologists (and perhaps also developmental psychologists), who are in a position to (...) collect such evidence, encouraging them to do so. (shrink)

This book offers the first sustained critique of individualism in psychology, a view that has been the subject of debate between philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge for many years. The author approaches individualism as an issue in the philosophy of science and by discussing issues such as computationalism and the mind's modularity he opens the subject up for non-philosophers in psychology and computer science. Professor Wilson carefully examines the most influential arguments for individualism and identifies the (...) main metaphysical assumptions underlying them. Since the topic is so central to the philosophy of mind, a discipline generating enormous research and debate at present, the book has implications for a very broad range of philosophical issues including the naturalisation of intentionality, psychophysical supervenience, the nature of mental causation, and the viability of folk psychology. (shrink)

The author indicates some ways in which cartesian dualists can counter strawson's argument that no cartesian mind can be identified either by itself or by other such minds. Judging the identification argument inconclusive, The author formulates what he regards as a more effective argument against cartesian dualism. The argument is to the effect that cartesian dualism promises no satisfactory account of the unity of a mind. Noting that a cartesian mind is presumed (...) to be the subject of a multiplicity of simultaneous and successive experiences, The author thinks it legitimate to ask how the attribution of many experiences to the same subject is possible. He considers and rejects some answers that could be given in the framework of cartesian dualism. (shrink)

The book takes well-established, scientific evidence on consciousness to interrogate, and re envisions questions of personal reincarnation and thus of the mind/body problem. Methodologically, the basis of the book is rooted in the careful argumentation and logical appraisal of classical materialism and the history of the mind-body problem.

Malebranche argues that we lack a clear idea of the mind because we cannot, even in principle, derive all the possible modes of mind solely from the idea of thought. But we can, in principle, derive all the possible modes of body from the idea of extension. Therefore, there is epistemic asymmetry between our ideas of mind and body. I offer a defense of Descartes whereby he can assert that we have a clear idea of mind (...) despite this asymmetry. I argue that he can do this by distinguishing the simplicity of mind from the divisibility of body. (shrink)

This paper asks whether we should still be haunted by scepticism about other minds. It draws on the writings of Cavell and Husserl to show that there is some truth in the Cartesian premise that has given rise to scepticism about other minds, namely, that our self-awareness is of a fundamentally different type from our awareness of objects and other subjects. While this leads Cavell to argue that there is a truth to scepticism, it proves the opposite to Husserl, (...) viz. that other minds scepticism is necessarily non-sensical. The paper shows why Husserl's position is more convincing than Cavell's. 1. (shrink)

This article is about the exchanges between Leibniz, Arnauld, Bayle and Lamy on the subject of pain. The inability of Leibniz’s system to account for the phenomenon of pain is a recurring objection of Leibniz’s seventeenth-century Cartesian readers to his hypothesis of pre-established harmony: according to them, the spontaneity of the soul and its representative nature cannot account for the affective component of pain. Strikingly enough, this problem has almost never been addressed in Leibniz studies, or only incidentally, through (...) the more general problem of evil. My purpose in this article is to clarify Leibniz’s psychophysical parallelism by opposing his representationist account of pain to the functionalist account endorsed by Arnauld, Bayle, Lamy and Malebranche. (shrink)

Human beings pose a problem for Descartes’ metaphysics. They seem to be more than a mere sum of their mental and bodily parts; human beings, Descartes insists, are unions of mind and body. But what does that union amount to? In the first, negative, part of this paper I argue that, by Descartes’ own lights, there is no way for us to answer this question if we are looking for a proper metaphysics of the union. Metaphysics is the job (...) of the intellect; it involves understanding. On Descartes’ considered view, we don’t understand the union; we feel it through the internal senses. In the second, positive, part of the paper I argue that, while Descartes does not give a properly metaphysical account of the union, he does provide a rich phenomenology of it that is of both theoretical and practical interest. Along the way, I suggest a phenomenological reading of a number of important passages that scholars have interpreted as Descartes’ attempt to provide a metaphysics of the union. (shrink)

This book offers a sustained critique of individualism in psychology, a view that has been the subject of debate between philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge for many years. The author approaches individualism as an issue in the philosophy of science and by discussing issues such as computationalism and the mind's modularity he opens the subject up for non-philosophers in psychology and computer science. Professor Wilson carefully examines the most influential arguments for individualism and identifies the main (...) metaphysical assumptions underlying them. Since the topic is so central to the philosophy of mind, a discipline generating enormous research and debate, the book has implications for a very broad range of philosophical issues including the naturalisation of intentionality, psychophysical supervenience, the nature of mental causation, and the viability of folk psychology. (shrink)

This book is an extended discussion of individualism in the philosophy of mind.

This article discusses some essential differences between the Cartesian and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of child development. It argues that we should prefer the neo-Aristotelian conception since it is capable of resolving the problems the Cartesian conception is confronted by. This is illustrated by discussing the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian explanation of the development of volitional powers, and the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian simulation theory and theory–theory account of the development of social cognition. The neo-Aristotelian conception (...) is further elaborated by discussing how it differs from both behaviorism and cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Perhaps the most influential compatibilist response to this question is Fodor's strategy of levels. Fodor argues that although psychological laws range over world-involving propositional attitudes and their contents, these laws are implemented in computational mechanisms that supervene on the individual's intrinsic states.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 381-395 [Access article in PDF] Minds, Forms, and Spirits: The Nature of Cartesian Disenchantment Han van Ruler What is Descartes's contribution to Enlightenment? Undoubtedly, Cartesian philosophy added to the conflict between philosophical and theological views which divided intellectual life in the Dutch Republic towards the end of its "Golden Age." 1 Although not everyone was as explicit as Lodewijk (...) Meyer, who said that his theological doubts were inspired by Descartes's philosophical method, Cartesianism along with Copernicanism, Socinianism, and Cocceianism played an important part in the growing skepticism towards the authority of Scripture. 2 Apart from Descartes's general method, however, specific Cartesian ideas encouraged a new view towards nature and towards God's role in governing it. In physics and physiology the new philosophy replaced the image of mind working on matter with the image of a self sufficient mechanism. This new causal metaphor led to a typically Cartesian form of "disenchantment." In this article I argue that on account of their approval of a Cartesian theory of causality, even authors with sincere religious motives came close to accepting radical and nearly Spinozistic ideas. I start with disenchantment in a very literal sense: Balthasar Bekker's denial of the activities of devils, angels, and other spirits. A comparison of Bekker's arguments with those of another Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx will, I hope, bring out the nature and importance of what I shall present as [End Page 381] Descartes's "mechanical reduction" in physics. Finally, I argue that the Cartesian separation of mind and body gave rise to a form of disenchantment that reached far beyond contemporary debates. Devils, Ghosts, and God's Omnipotence Balthasar Bekker's classic book The World Bewitched (1691-93) does not so much deal with the practice of sorcery as with its theory. Bekker offers a wide range of theological and philosophical arguments in order to combat the idea that ghosts, devils, and angels influence natural or historical events. In particular Bekker draws some important conclusions from the philosophy of Descartes. Yet it is immediately clear to the reader that the motives for his critique are religious rather than philosophical. 3 The World Bewitched is not written as a scientific assault on superstition. Bekker, at the time serving as a Calvinist minister in Amsterdam, presents his work as a new and perhaps final phase in the perfection of Christianity. For two centuries it had been a goal of the Protestant Reformation to accentuate God's majesty and to establish the idea of His absolute power over creation. Bekker's World again expresses this idea. His denial that ghosts and devils are active in the world is a logical consequence of the belief that there is no room for demigods in nature. Bekker thus adds a final touch to the project of the Reformation. The World Bewitched will testify to the fact "that I return as much of the honor of His Power and Wisdom to the Almighty, as they took from Him who gave it to the Devil. I ban [the Devil] from the World and I bind him in Hell." 4 Removing devils and spirits from nature, Bekker aims to distinguish superstition from true faith. The battle against superstitious beliefs had formed a characteristic element of Protestant tactics. Dutch Calvinists, for instance, took offense at the continuing practices of blessings and incantations. 5 Bekker wanted to go even further. The Protestantization of Christian dogma could only be completed by making everything in nature's course depend on God's unique power and providence. 6 "Science" in our sense of the word was a subsidiary matter. 7 Still, Bekker saw the new scientific theories of his day as useful allies. In particular it was the new philosophy of Descartes that attracted him. Following Descartes, Bekker reasons "that I think, that I will, [End Page 382] [and] that I understand something," without any part of my body being involved in this type of consciousness. Mind and body in fact have nothing in common: My... (shrink)

Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage (...) and thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs. _The Mind-Body Stage_ provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents from several countries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 381-395 [Access article in PDF] Minds, Forms, and Spirits: The Nature of Cartesian Disenchantment Han van Ruler What is Descartes's contribution to Enlightenment? Undoubtedly, Cartesian philosophy added to the conflict between philosophical and theological views which divided intellectual life in the Dutch Republic towards the end of its "Golden Age." 1 Although not everyone was as explicit as Lodewijk (...) Meyer, who said that his theological doubts were inspired by Descartes's philosophical method, Cartesianism along with Copernicanism, Socinianism, and Cocceianism played an important part in the growing skepticism towards the authority of Scripture. 2 Apart from Descartes's general method, however, specific Cartesian ideas encouraged a new view towards nature and towards God's role in governing it. In physics and physiology the new philosophy replaced the image of mind working on matter with the image of a self sufficient mechanism. This new causal metaphor led to a typically Cartesian form of "disenchantment." In this article I argue that on account of their approval of a Cartesian theory of causality, even authors with sincere religious motives came close to accepting radical and nearly Spinozistic ideas. I start with disenchantment in a very literal sense: Balthasar Bekker's denial of the activities of devils, angels, and other spirits. A comparison of Bekker's arguments with those of another Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx will, I hope, bring out the nature and importance of what I shall present as [End Page 381] Descartes's "mechanical reduction" in physics. Finally, I argue that the Cartesian separation of mind and body gave rise to a form of disenchantment that reached far beyond contemporary debates. Devils, Ghosts, and God's Omnipotence Balthasar Bekker's classic book The World Bewitched (1691-93) does not so much deal with the practice of sorcery as with its theory. Bekker offers a wide range of theological and philosophical arguments in order to combat the idea that ghosts, devils, and angels influence natural or historical events. In particular Bekker draws some important conclusions from the philosophy of Descartes. Yet it is immediately clear to the reader that the motives for his critique are religious rather than philosophical. 3 The World Bewitched is not written as a scientific assault on superstition. Bekker, at the time serving as a Calvinist minister in Amsterdam, presents his work as a new and perhaps final phase in the perfection of Christianity. For two centuries it had been a goal of the Protestant Reformation to accentuate God's majesty and to establish the idea of His absolute power over creation. Bekker's World again expresses this idea. His denial that ghosts and devils are active in the world is a logical consequence of the belief that there is no room for demigods in nature. Bekker thus adds a final touch to the project of the Reformation. The World Bewitched will testify to the fact "that I return as much of the honor of His Power and Wisdom to the Almighty, as they took from Him who gave it to the Devil. I ban [the Devil] from the World and I bind him in Hell." 4 Removing devils and spirits from nature, Bekker aims to distinguish superstition from true faith. The battle against superstitious beliefs had formed a characteristic element of Protestant tactics. Dutch Calvinists, for instance, took offense at the continuing practices of blessings and incantations. 5 Bekker wanted to go even further. The Protestantization of Christian dogma could only be completed by making everything in nature's course depend on God's unique power and providence. 6 "Science" in our sense of the word was a subsidiary matter. 7 Still, Bekker saw the new scientific theories of his day as useful allies. In particular it was the new philosophy of Descartes that attracted him. Following Descartes, Bekker reasons "that I think, that I will, [End Page 382] [and] that I understand something," without any part of my body being involved in this type of consciousness. Mind and body in fact have nothing in common: My... (shrink)

This thesis has three parts. In the first part, the author defends the coherence of Cartesian scepticism about the external world. In particular, the author contends that such scepticism survives attacks from Descartes himself, as well as from W.V.O. Quine, Robert Nozick, Alvin Goldman, and David Armstrong. It follows that Cartesian scepticism remains intact. In the second part of this thesis, the author contends that the semantic or content externalisms of Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge do not refute (...) Cartesian scepticism about the external world. In particular, he argues that Putnam and Burge do not make good their respective externalist cases against scepticism, and that they beg the question against that position. The author concludes that semantic or content externalism is important against such scepticism. In the third part of this thesis, the author addresses the mind, and suggests that Descartes, by offering his cogito argument, also offers a theory of thought content, which he then supports with his substance dualism. He suggests that Descartes does not succeed with any of his arguments here, although his theory of thought content is still plausible. To remedy this, the author discusses the versions of narrow meaning or content offered by Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn, and defends a version of such meaning or content that presupposes that semantic or content externalism is false. The author lastly follows Donald Davidson, and argues for a version anomalous monism, which he contends is a theory that shows how semantic or content internalism might be true. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge ("can God look into the human mind?"), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A great part (...) of the latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language-games undergo within it. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As (...) a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body. (shrink)

In this piece, I argue against the Cartesian trend of seeing persons, selves and mind as something distinct from the body. It is claimed that Descartes realized the importance of the link between body and mind, but never pursued this connection, and this then becomes the aim of the paper. Another effect of Cartesian modes of thinking is to divorce human knowledge from its material contexts, driving a wedge between mind and matter. Some forms of (...) social constructionism appear to fall into this latter trap and instead I argue for a view of persons as embodied beings whose selves are intimately connected to the body. Using the work of Bourdieu, Elias, Merleau-Ponty, and Ilyenkov, I also suggest that thought cannot be disengaged from a human body active in its world and that knowledge not only partly separates us from the materiality of existence, but connects us to it in deeper ways, as another dimension of human existence. Human beings can then be regarded as bodies of knowledge – active thinkers and persons engaged with the multi-dimensional world around them and capable of producing change. (shrink)

There are few philosophers who have been so influential in their own lifetimes and had so much influence, only to be subsequently ignored, as Henri Bergson (1859-1941). When in April 1922, Bergson debated Einstein on the nature of time, it was Bergson who was far better known and respected. Now Einstein’s achievements are known to everyone, but very few people outside philosophy departments have even heard of Bergson. Following Friedrich Schelling and those he influenced, Bergson targeted the Cartesian dualism (...) that permeates the culture of modernity. In doing so, he challenged deep assumptions rooted in and cemented in place by Descartes’ philosophy. It this article I will argue that Bergson made considerable progress in this attack on Cartesian dualism, and diverse philosophers subsequently built on his ideas. However, failure to appreciate the source of these ideas has weakened their impact, being scattered among different disciplines by diverse philosophers and scientists who drew upon Bergson’s work while forgetting details of his philosophy. This article is an effort to rectify this situation. (shrink)