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Descartes view on the mind body issue
Descartes view on the mind body issue
Descartes sixth meditation summary
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In Descartes sixth meditation, he brings up his argument that the body has separate parts, but the mind does not. He supports his argument by saying he," a thinking thing", "cannot detect any separate parts within himself", that he "understands himself to something single and complete , and "any corporeal thing can easily be divided into parts in my thought; and this shows me that it is really divisible". He then went on to use the example that if a body part is" cut off nothing is thereby taken away from the mind." All of the points Descartes uses here raise all sorts of questions. The brain has separate parts that have functions for each part, each of these parts depend on each other to properly function as a whole. If one part is damaged
The premise the mind cannot be split we know to be false. For example in the 1960s Scientists Sperry and Gazzaniga split the brain in studies of epilepsy. The result was having two minds operating in two different specialised areas. The patients for example would see a picture of an object in their right vision but see themselves holding another object in their left vision. This resulted in confusion in the patients due to conflicting perception of what they are seeing in their split brain (nobelprize.org, 2016). This shows that Descartes’ premise was wrong because the mind can be split. Thereby we can see Descartes reason for believing that the mind can exist without the body is limited. The split brain procedure isn’t the only modern day article that limits Descartes reasoning from body-mind divisibility. There are mental disorders such as the dissociative identity disorder whereby the mind appears to be split into different identities. This results in there appearing to be more than one person living inside a single body. This example of mental disorder depicts that the mind is divisible and thereby Descartes reasoning is furthermore limited. In modern day understanding of the mind, there are disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder that signify that the mind can be ‘broken’. Studies in physical brain damage, for example car crashes causing loss of memory and suggest that the mind
Baird and Kaufmann, the editors of our text, explain in their outline of Descartes' epistemology that the method by which the thinker carried out his philosophical work involved first discovering and being sure of a certainty, and then, from that certainty, reasoning what else it meant one could be sure of. He would admit nothing without being absolutely satisfied on his own (i.e., without being told so by others) that it was incontrovertible truth. This system was unique, according to the editors, in part because Descartes was not afraid to face doubt. Despite the fact that it was precisely doubt of which he was endeavoring to rid himself, he nonetheless allowed it the full reign it deserved and demanded over his intellectual labors. "Although uncertainty and doubt were the enemies," say Baird and Kaufmann (p.16), "Descartes hit upon the idea of using doubt as a tool or as a weapon. . . . He would use doubt as an acid to pour over every 'truth' to see if there was anything that could not be dissolved . . . ." This test, they explain, resulted for Descartes in the conclusion that, if he doubted everything in the world there was to doubt, it was still then certain that he was doubting; further, that in order to doubt, he had to exist. His own existence, therefore, was the first truth he could admit to with certainty, and it became the basis for the remainder of his epistemology.
In his work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes narrates the search for certainty in order to recreate all knowledge. He begins with “radical doubt.” He asks a simple question “Is there any one thing of which we can be absolutely certain?” that provides the main question of his analysis. Proceeding forward, he states that the ground of his foundation is the self – evident knowledge of the “thinking thing,” which he himself is. Moving up the tower of certainty, he focuses on those ideas that can be supported by his original foundation. In such a way, Descartes’s goal is to establish all of human knowledge of firm foundations. Thus, Descartes gains this knowledge from the natural light by using it to reference his main claims, specifically
Descartes’ dream arguement that he engages in within the ‘First Meditation’ is very complex and tends to have readers feeling skeptical if they are truly awake and no whats going on in the world around them, or if they are actually just dreaming. His arguementcan be both easy to understand as well as breaking down claims to know certain things going on around the world. Descartes describes how people believing they are awake and not dreaming right now may be shaken and wary. At first glance, it came to my perspective that Descartes is delusional to believe that one might believe that they are dreaming and are not awake. I believe this because when one wakes up in the morning they are awake and no longer dreaming, when they open their eyes they see the world and they begin to once again exsist within the world, therefore to be dreaming is not certain and therefore would not make sense to a regualr person. Descartes highlights in his defense the lack of insight a person has in the condition when dreaming, while not awake. In “First Meditation”, Descartes states:
Descartes continues the distinction in the Sixth Meditation, where he observes the body is by its nature divisible where the mind is completely indivisible. Descartes knows his body and mind are unified although, when something is cut off from the body such as an arm, nothing is lost from the mind. The body is a physical substance that can be described by quantitative qualities like size, shape and extension. Allowing for it to be divided into parts, for example a cake like the body has a certain size, shape and dimensions that can be divided into multiple smaller sizes. The mind is a qualitative substance that cannot be divided, such as smell; there cannot be half or a quarter of a smell. The mind is not an a corporeal or extended substance like the body therefore it is not capable of being divisible. Since the body and the mind do not share the same property of being divisible or indivisible the mind and body are distinctly different. Descartes claim for mind body dualism can be seen as false, I will argue that the m...
Initial answer: My initial answer is to the question of whether scientific knowledge should be based on observations is yes, observations are to be the basis of all scientific knowledge.
One of the ways in which Descartes attempts to prove that the mind is distinct from the body is through his claim that the mind occupies no physical space and is an entity with which people think, while the body is a physical entity and cannot serve as a mechanism for thought. [1]
...tions rose by his objectors, for me, from a rather impregnable undermining of Descartes’ philosophy. As their must simply be interaction between two extended objects for any sort of reaction to take place. Therefore the movement that results from such a reaction must occur between two extended objects. This is my main and principal concern with Descartes philosophy and is the reason I, at least believe, Descartes does not make a convincing argument over the nature of mind-body separation. As from looking solely at Descartes research, he is not right to say there is a divide between the body and the mind.
Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six different steps that he named "Meditations" because of the state of mind he was in while he was contemplating all these different ideas. His six meditations are "One:Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", "Two:Concerning the Nature of the Human mind: that it is better known than the Body", "Three: Concerning God, that he exists", "Four: Concerning the True and the False", "Five: Concerning the Essence of Material things, and again concerning God, that he exists" and finally "Six: Concerning the Existence of Material things, and the real distinction between Mind and Body". Although all of these meditations are relevant and necessary to understand the complete work as a whole, the focus of this paper will be the first meditation.
In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes makes a point that there is a distinction between mind and body. It is in Meditation Two when Descartes believes he has shown the mind to be better known than the body. In Meditation Six, however, he goes on to claim that, as he knows his mind and knows clearly and distinctly that its essence consists purely of thought. Also, that bodies' essences consist purely of extension, and that he can conceive of his mind and body as existing separately. By the power of God, anything that can be clearly and distinctly conceived of as existing separately from something else can be created as existing separately. However, Descartes claims that the mind and body have been created separated without good reason. This point is not shown clearly, and further, although I can conceive of my own mind existing independently of my body, it does not necessarily exist as so.
Descartes argued in his AMeditations on First Philosophy@ that the mind is a thinking, non-divisible, non-extended thing and that the body is a non-thinking, divisible, extended thing. In his sixth Meditation, Descartes states A...I have a body with which I am very closely united, nevert...
Descartes argues that the mind and body can be thought of as separate substances. Descartes writes “I have a body that is very closely joined to me, nevertheless, because … I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing and not an extended thing and because … I have a distinct idea of a body, insofar as it is merely an extended thing and not a thinking thing, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and can exist without it” ( Descartes 50). With this quote, Descartes is saying that the mind and body are separate because he has two distinct ideas of the body and the mind and the body is not a thinking thing as he is but an extended substance. Another point to Descartes argument is that the mind and body are different due to one being indivisible and the other being divisible. Descartes writes “a body, by its very nature, is always divisible. On the other hand, the mind is utterly indivisible” (53). Here is saying that there are ...
But, simply refuting Descartes’s example is not enough to shake his justification for trusting that he is in fact awake and can distinguish his being awake from dreaming. To further discredit this notion as it stands at the end of Meditation Six, one could consider the case of some extended dream-like scenario. Whether it be a comatose state or the somewhat more outlandish scenario of the Matrix (well, at least a Matrix without glitches and escapees which could tip one off as to its distinction from true reality), such a scenario poses a serious problem for Descartes’s reliance on the consistency indicator. While one is in some extended dream or coma state, there is really no particular reason as to why the dream (or dream-like) experience
Throughout his Meditations on First Philosophy, Renè Descartes assumes the position of a toddler and discards everything he thought he knew as true. In the first meditations, Descartes attempts to prove the existence of himself, while also completely doubting all of his external senses. Unlike most philosophers in the 1600's, Descartes believed in the possibility that he is just living in an extravagant dream, where all of his observations are inaccurate and false. Even if the fundamentals of mathematics and science still hold true, the colors, shapes, and other characteristic features of an object in a dream could be skewed or fake. Since there is no way of determining if we are in a dream, we cannot verify or believe in any of our senses.
In Descartes Meditations he utilizes that the sensible properties of a piece of bees wax do not define inherently what the wax is because if the wax changes according to its sensible properties it is still the same piece of wax and the only way to come to that conclusion is through the mind. Furthermore, what we know about the wax, whether there are characteristics that change or do not change, does not alter the fact that it is the same piece of wax, which further reiterates Descartes main point in Meditations which is that the senses cannot be trusted and that we must rely solely on the mind which we know exists because "[We] think, therefore [we] are."