How did Descartes Explain the Relationship between Mind and Body?

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Across the years, many scientists and philosophers believed that a human being is made up by mind and body (Radner, 1971). Some of them believed that the mind-soul is something different from the body and each of them works by themselves without any interaction between them (Radner, 1971). The other point of view said that body and mind works together as a unity and mutually influences each other and the result is the human being. This view had been held by great figures like the Greek philosopher Aristotle and Aquinas (Radner, 1971). Who argued that there should be a connection between mind-soul and body, because only in this way sensation and voluntary movement which needs both mind and body to operate can be explained (Radner, 1971). Contrary, philosophers like Plato and Augustine held the view that mind-soul and body are two completely different entities. They argue that soul is an independent entity which can work by itself without any help from the body and thus it is not part of it (Radner, 1971). One of those people who dealt with this issue was Rene Descartes a rationalist, nativist and dualist who tried to find the connection between soul and body through his work in 1649 with the title ‘Treatise on the Passions of the Soul’ (Fancher, & Rutherford, 2012).

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) a philosopher and mathematician was one of the biggest and greatest figures in the nativism empiricism period (Wertheimer, 2000). He served his country in the thirty years war in which he saw many things that helps him with his future treatises (Wertheimer, 2000). One day he dreamed that his destiny was to reorganize the knowledge, so, he started to materialize his dream (Wertheimer, 2000). He tried to find out all the things that he wil...

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... to find the place which two images and the two impressions reunite and transferred to the soul as one (Fancher, & Rutherford, 2012). His observation led him to the only structure of the brain which was not divided in two parts the Pineal gland (Radner, 1971; Wertheimer, 2000; Fancher, & Rutherford, 2012). The pineal gland was located in between of the two symmetrical halves of the brain, so, he was determined that this structure of the brain was the control centre (Wertheimer, 2000; Fancher, & Rutherford, 2012). Furthermore, in his treatise about the passions of the soul he explained how the two images of the eyes end up to pineal gland the control centre (Radner, 1971; Wertheimer, 2000; Fancher, & Rutherford, 2012). He claimed that when a human saw an object light rays comes out and the image of the object refracted and enters in the retinas of the two eyes.

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