In his Meditations, Rene Descartes asks, "what am I?" His initial answer is "a man." But he soon discards it: "But what is a man? Shall I say 'a rational animal'? No: for then I should inquire what an animal is, what rationality is, and in this way one question would lead down the slope to harder ones." Instead of understanding what a man is, Descartes shifts to two new questions: "What is Mind?" and "What is Body?" These questions develop (...) into Descartes's main philosophical preoccupation: the Mind-Body distinction. How can Mind and Body be independent entities, yet joined--essentially so--within a single human being? If Mind and Body are really distinct, are human beings merely a "construction"? On the other hand, if we respect the integrity of humans, are Mind and Body merely aspects of a human being and not subjects in and of themselves? For centuries, philosophers have considered this classic philosophical puzzle. Now, in this compact, engaging, and long-awaited work UCLA philosopher Joseph Almog closely decodes the French philosopher's argument for distinguishing between the human mind and body while maintaining simultaneously their essential integration in a human being. He argues that Descartes constructed a solution whereby the trio of Human Mind, Body, and Being are essentially interdependent yet remain each a genuine individual subject. Almog's reading not only steers away from the most popular interpretations of Descartes, but also represents a scholar coming to grips directly with Descartes himself. In doing so, Almog creates a work that Cartesian scholars will value, and that will also prove indispensable to philosophers of language, ontology, and the metaphysics of mind. (shrink)

_Two positions on the mind-body problem are here_ _compared:__Materialism__, which is here taken to mean the thesis_ _that mind plays no part in the determination of behaviour so that,_ _for all the good it does us, we might just as well have evolved as_ _insentient automata, and_ _Ineractionism_ _which is here taken as its_ _contradictory._.

Philosophers of mind typically conduct their discussions in terms of mental events, mental processes, mental properties, mental states – but rarely in terms of minds themselves. Sometimes this neglect is explicitly acknowledged. Donald Davidson, for example, writes that ‘there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events’.2 Hilary Putnam agrees, though for somewhat different reasons: (...) The view I have long defended is that the mind is not a thing; talk of our minds is talk of world-involving capabilities that we have and activities that we engage in. As Dewey succinctly put it, “Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situation in which we find ourselves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares and remembers”. But the traditional view, by treating mental states as states of the “underlying substance”, makes them properties of something “inside”, and, if one is a materialist philosopher, that means properties of our brains. So the next problem naturally seems to be: “Which neurological properties of our brains do these mental properties ‘reduce’ to?” For how could our brains have properties that aren’t neurological? And this is how materialist philosophers saw the problem until the advent of such new alternatives in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language as Functionalism and Semantic Externalism. (shrink)

This paper’s outline is as follows. In sections 1-3 I give an exposi¬tion of the Mind-Body Problem, with emphasis on what I believe to be the heart of the problem, namely, the Percepts-Qualia Nonidentity and its incompatibility with the Physical Closure Paradigm. In 4 I present the “Qualia Inaction Postulate” underlying all non-interactionist theo¬ries that seek to resolve the above problem. Against this convenient postulate I propose in section 5 the “Bafflement Ar¬gument,” which is this paper's main thesis. Sections 6-11 (...) critically dis¬cuss attempts to dismiss the Bafflement Argument by the “Baf¬flement=Mis¬perception Equation.” Section 12 offers a refutation of all such attempts in the form of a concise “Asymmetry Proof.” Section 13 points out the bearing of the Bafflement Argument on the evolutionary role of consciousness while section 14 acknowledges the price that has to be paid for it in terms of basic physical principles. Section 15 summarizes the paper, pointing out the inescapability of interactionist dualism. (shrink)

In this short paper, I shall examine some key structural features of Descartes’s metaphysics, as it relates to mind–body dualism. The style of presentation will partly be one of rational reconstruction, designed to present the Cartesian system in a way that will be of maximal interest to contemporary metaphysicians. Section 1 focuses on five key Cartesian theses about principal attributes. Sections 2 and 3 examine how those theses play themselves out in Descartes’s discussion of mind–body dualism.

Contemporary arguments for forms of psycho-physical dualism standardly depart from phenomenal aspects of consciousness ('what it is like' to have some particular conscious experience). Conceptual aspects of conscious experience, as opposed to phenomenal or visual/perceptual ones, are often taken to be within the scope of functionalist, reductionist, or physicalist theories. I argue that the particular conceptual structure of human consciousness makes this asymmetry unmotivated. The argument for a form of dualism defended here proceeds from the empirical premise that conceptual structure (...) in a linguistic creature like us is a combinatorial and compositional system that implicates a distinction between simple and complex, or 'atomic' and 'molecular' concepts. The argument is that conceptual atoms, qua atoms, are irreducible to anything else. If so, and if the atoms are essentially semantic, a form of dualism follows: though positively inviting naturalistic inquiry into the semantic and mental aspects of nature, it requires that we look at the mental as a primitive domain of nature. Schematically, then, the argument is as follows: (1) Human consciousness/thought is conceptually structured. (2) The human conceptual system is a 'particulate' system at a syntactic and semantic level of representation (the notion of a 'particulate' system is developed in Section 2). (3) This implies the existence of conceptual 'particles', concepts that have no further semantic decomposition ('atoms'). (4) A conceptual atom cannot be explained in terms of anything that does not involve its own intrinsic properties (Section 3). (5) Physicalism as normally conceived is inconsistent with (3) and (4) (Section 4). (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates Jaegwon Kim’s recent argument against substance dualism. The argument runs as follows. Causal interaction between two entities requires pairing relations. Pairing relations are spatial relations, such as distance and orientation. Souls are supposedly nonspatial, immaterial substances. So it is hard to see how souls could enter into paired causal relations with material substances. I show that Kim’s argument against dualism fails. I conclude by sketching a way the substance dualist could meet Kim’s central challenge of (...) explaining how souls and bodies are uniquely paired, allowing for them to enter into specific causal relationships, forming a singular soul–body unit. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the view, defended by some philosophers, that it is part of the meaning of mental that being mental is incompatible with being physical. I call this outlook metalinguistic dualism (MLD for short), and I distinguish it from metaphysical theories of the mind-body relation such as Cartesian dualism. I argue that MLD is mistaken, but I don't try to defend the contrary view that mentalistic terms can be definitionally reduced to nonmental ones. After criticizing arguments (...) by certain philosophers which purport to establish MLD, I formulate a criterion for a phenomenon's being mental. I then show that this criterion is neutral between monistic and dualistic theories of the mind-body relation. Since if MLD were true it should be impossible to construct such a criterion, I conclude that it is false (i.e., if it is intended as a descriptive thesis about our language). The significance of my paper is that if I am right then I remove one important type of objection to aposteriori, noneliminative forms of the identity theory of mind, namely that such theories ought to be rejected merely on the basis of semantical considerations about the word mental. Beyond that, I believe that my criterion of mental phenomena correctly captures our intuitions about the nature of the distinction between mental and nonmental phenomena. (shrink)

During the last quarter-century, mind-body dualism has been doing surprisingly well: Campbell (1984), Swinburne (1986), Madell (1988), Robinson (1988, 2004), Hart (1988), Foster (1991), Seager (1991), Strawson (1994), Chalmers (1995), Taliaferro (1996), Bealer (1997), Stubenberg (1998), Griffin (1998), Hasker (1999), Rosenberg (2004), and others. But, with the notable exceptions of Swinburne, Hart and Foster,1 these dualists are merely property dualists rather than Cartesian substance dualists. They hold that some of our mental states have immaterial properties, but not that we ourselves (...) are immaterial Cartesian souls entirely distinct from our bodies. The prevalent idea is that property dualism is tenable (or even demonstrated), but we are not crazy. I reject this disparity. I think that most of the standard objections to Cartesian dualism (CD) count as effectively against property dualism (PD), and that PD is hardly more plausible, or less implausible, than CD. Granted, assuming that a Cartesian ego would eo ipso have some immaterial mental properties, you might suppose that CD is logically stronger than PD; so one would need a reason for accepting CD over and above PD, and there must be at least one objection that applies to CD but not to PD. However, as we shall see, nonCartesian property dualism (PD & CD) faces at least two objections that CD does not. (shrink)

To the extent that dualism is even taken to be a serious option in contemporary discussions of personal identity and the philosophy of mind, it is almost exclusively either Cartesian dualism or property dualism that is considered. The more traditional dualism defended by Aristotelians and Thomists, what I call hylemorphic dualism, has only received scattered attention. In this essay I set out the main lines of the hylemorphic dualist position, with particular reference to personal identity. First I argue that overemphasis (...) of the problem of consciousness has had an unhealthy effect on recent debate, claiming instead that we should emphasize the concept of form. Then I bring in the concept of identity by means of the notion of substantial form. I continue by analyzing the relation between form and matter, defending the traditional theses of prime matter and of the unicity of substantial form. I then argue for the immateriality of the substantial form of the human person, viz. the soul, from an account of the human intellect. From this follows the soul's essential independence of matter. Finally, although the soul is the immaterial bearer of personal identity, that identity is still the identity of an essentially embodied being. I explain how these ideas are to be reconciled. Footnotesa I am grateful to Stephen Braude, John Cottingham, John Haldane, David Jehle, Joel Katzav, Eduardo Ortiz, and Fred Sommers for helpful comments and discussion of a draft of this essay. I would also like to thank Ellen Paul, whose suggestions have helped greatly to improve the essay's style and content. (shrink)

Cartesian or substance dualism is the view that concrete substances come in two basic kinds. There are material things, such as biological organisms. These may be either simple or composed of parts. And there are immaterial things--minds or souls--which are always simple. No material thing depends for its existence on any soul, or vice versa. And only souls can think.

This is a revised and updated version of Swinburne's controversial treatment of the eternal philosophical problem of the relation between mind and body. He argues that we can only make sense of the interaction between the mental and the physical in terms of the soul, and that there is no scientific explanation of the evolution of the soul.

That there is an epistemological difference between the mental and the physical is well- known. Introspection readily generates knowledge of one’s own conscious experience, but fails to yield evidence for the existence of anything physical. Conversely, empirical investigation delivers knowledge of physical properties, but neither finds nor requires us to posit conscious experience. In recent decades, a series of neo-Cartesian arguments have emerged that rest on this epistemological difference and purport to demonstrate that mind-brain identity is false and that consciousness (...) is not even realized by or supervenient on physical properties. Where Descartes argued he could clearly and distinctly conceive mind and body as existing separately, contemporary anti-physicalists hold that the conceivability of worlds in which actual world correlations between physical and phenomenological properties fail shows that these correlations are contingent rather than logically or metaphysically necessary. Together with Descartes, they conclude from conceivability that identity, as well as strong supervenience, is false.¹ If the argument of this paper is correct, however, then there is an argument for dualism that arises from the epistemological distinction, is grounded in the Meditations, and is yet distinct from the

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conceivability arguments pursued both by Descartes and contemporary anti-physicalists. Furthermore, the argument is immune to the standard objections to conceivability arguments: its conclusion follows even if there are a posteriori identities between physical and phenomenal properties. (shrink)