Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

6. Another Split — Mind and Body

In the last chapter we saw a kind of mysterian split, between objects as observed in the world and ‘things-in-themselves’. I described this as a mysterian split because the split pushes some of the world out of the realm of empirical truth and into the realm of mysterian truth. As such, it pushes things out of the realm of knowledge as it is usually understood. As if that were not problematic enough, the dualism this chapter explores goes further. Instead of taking aspects of objective reality out of our knowledge of the world, it threatens to take our subjective selves — our minds — out of the realm of knowledge.

So this chapter explores the main type of ‘dualism’ in philosophy. This is the view that mental phenomena are in some way non-physical. The best-known version of this is from Descartes (Cartesian dualism) and holds that the mind is a non-physical substance. The idea dates back to Plato (and probably earlier) and the spilt between soul and body. As explored in the last chapter, Cartesian dualism falls under the category of substance dualism — there are two substances, one is matter and the other is consciousness.

Descartes claimed that the only thing he cannot doubt is that he is thinking and because he is thinking then he believes this proves he exists.

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