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The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Stephen Yablo
Stephen Yablo*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI48109, U.S.A.
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Extract

….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.

Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the Meditations

Substance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and bodies per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 16: Canadian Philosophers — Celebrating Twenty Years of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 1990 , pp. 149 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1990

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Footnotes

*

This paper is dedicated to the memory of George Myra; an early version was read at the George Myra Memorial Conference at UC Berkeley, and a later version at the University of Arizona. Thanks to George Bealer, Jonathan Bennett, Paul Boghossian, Janet Broughton, David Copp, Sally Haslanger, Keith Lehrer, Louis Loeb, Vann McGee, Joe Mendola, Sarah Patterson, Larry Sklar, Barry Stroud, William Taschek, Bruce Thomas, David Velleman, Ken Walton, and two anonymous referees for questions, discussion, and advice. Research supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

References

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