Online research in philosophy

In this paper I explain several ways in which Descartes denied that the human soul or mind is composite and the role this idea played in his thought. The mind is whole in the whole and whole in the parts of the body because it has no parts. Unlike body, the mind is indivisible, and this is a different idea from the thought that mind and body are incorruptible. Descartes connects the immortality of the soul with its status as a substance and as incorruptible rather than with its indivisibility.

It is widely-accepted that Descartes is a substance dualist, i.e. that he holds that there are two and only two kinds of finite substance – mind and body. However, several scholars have argued that Descartes is a substance trialist, where the third kind of substance he admits is the substantial union of a mind and a body, the human being. In this paper, I argue against the trialist interpretation of Descartes. First, I show that the strongest evidence for trialism, based on Descartes' discussion of so-called incomplete substances, is highly inconclusive. Second, I show that a kind of unity (‘unity of nature’), which is had by all and only substances, is not had by human beings. The fact that the proper parts of a human being, namely a mind and a body, are of different natures entails that what they compose has at most a ‘unity of composition’. And a thing cannot be a substance in virtue of having a unity of composition. Therefore, Cartesian human beings are not substances.

Arnauld raised the concern that Descartes’s real distinction argument proved too much, because it seemed to lead us back to the Platonic view according to which the mind uses the body as its vehicle. Descartes responds by pointing out that he argued against this account of mind-body union in the Sixth Meditation. Descartes believes he did not prove too much, because he offers an argument against this view whose premises and conclusion are consistent with the real distinction argument. In this paper, the union argument is reconstructed and evaluated in order to see if, through his rejection of the Platonic view, Descartes adequately addresses Arnauld’s concern. In the end, Descartes adequately addresses this concern only if God’s veracity provides a secure foundation for a crucial inference. Finally, these considerations show a way for those committed to the real distinction of mind and body to avoid the problem of their interaction.

ne of the leading problems for Cartesian dualism is to provide an account of the union of mind and body. This problem is often construed to be one of explaining how thinking things and extended things can causally interact. That is, it needs to be explained how thoughts in the mind can produce motions in the body and how motions in the body can produce sensations, appetites, and emotions in the mind. The conclusion often drawn, as it was by three of Descartes's illustrious successors, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, is that mind and body cannot causally interact.' I mention this problem of the interaction between thinking things and extended things only to distinguish it from the problem concerning the union of mind and body which I wish to discuss. Some commentators, such as Daisie Radner, maintain that the..

I contend that Descartes’s view of mind-body union is not a Platonic view in which the soul uses the body as its vehicle, but hylomorphic in that mind and body form a single unit. I argue that Descartes’s view is most like Ockham’s, and therefore Descartes is entitled to maintain a hylomorphic theory to the same extent that Ockham is. I argue further that the soul is the substantial form of human being, and that mind and body are incomplete substances that are substantially united to form the human substance. Finally, I address Descartes’s claim that the whole soul has its principle seat in the pineal gland, and conclude that this does not imply a Platonic view as one might suspect. This hylomorphic interpretation avoids the problem of mind-body interaction, which might be seen as preventing the possibility of the soul’s immortality, because an explanation of the behavior of one entity is required instead of an explanation of the interaction between two, apparently incompatible, entities.

Descartes’ epistemologies of meditation and sense imply that we cannot know anything about the mind-body union, either in the Cartesian sense of having scientia or, more interestingly, in terms of any other concept of knowledge available to Descartes. After considering the implications of this conclusion for what we may know about mind-body interaction, it becomes clear that, on Descartes’ view, we at best can be said to know that mind-body interaction, if it does in fact take place, does not violate a set of causal principles, without knowing how mind and body interact, or even if they interact at all. (This article is the winner of the 2010 Rockefeller Prize awarded by the American Philosophical Association.).

This paper reflects on the status of Descartes' notion of the mind-body union as an object of knowledge in the framework of his new philosophy of nature, and argues that it should be taken seriously as representing a third kind of real thing or reality—that of human nature. Because it does not meet the criteria of distinctness that the two natures composing it—those of thinking minds and extended bodies— meet, the phenomena referred to it, which are objects of psychology as traditionally understood, fall outside the scope of clear and distinct perception required for knowledge. The prospects for rationalist psychology are bleak, since because of the mind-body union so little of the contents of the human mind are accessible to rational inspection or introspection. Mechanistic natural philosophy on the other hand gives us knowledge only of the physiological and corporeal aspects of the phenomena Descartes classifies as mental. What pertains to the mind-body union can only be known through the senses, moreover, we learn to conceive the mind-body union only through daily experience (“usant seulement de la vie et des conversations ordinaries”, AT 3, 695). I discuss the nature of this experience, and the sense in which Cartesian psychology without being part of his philosophy of nature in the strict sense of the term, can still be seen as a naturalist undertaking in a more traditional sense of nature where life, sentience, reasoning and rational action are all seen as natural phenomena.

In this paper I analyze Descartes's puzzling claim that the mind is whole in the whole body and whole in its parts, what Henry More called "holenmerism". I explain its historical background, in particular in scholasticism. I argue that like his predecessors, Descartes uses the idea for two purposes, for mind-body interaction and for the union of body and mind.

Cet article étudie la vue cartésienne de l'homme et la connaissance obtenue par la notion de l'union de l'âme et du corps. Le but est d'analyser les conséquences de la distinction cartésienne entre des notions primitives différentes et incomparables, et des différents genres de connaître qui s'en suivent, conséquences qui à cause de l'influence de la version Ryleienne du dualisme cartésien sont restées largement ignorées dans les débats anglo-américains récents. This paper examines Descartes's view of man and the understanding involved in the notion of the mind-body union. The aim is to spell out the implications of Descartes's distinction between different and incomparable primary notion and related kinds of knowledge, which due to the misleading but influential Rylean version of Descartes's mind-body dualism have remained largely unnoticed in the contemporary Anglo-American debate.