Summary Of Rene Descartes Dualism

3.1.2 Cartesian’s dualism

The discussion of ‘mind-body’ problem in the work of Rene Descartes involves a complex philosophical system that combines mathematics, psychology and the physical sciences, for example, the use of mathematics by Descartes help him to establish a separation between mind and body. Descartes(1641/1985) suggests that there are “corporeal things” and the ‘intellectual act” (p.55), he asserts that “[corporeal things] in general terms are comprised within the subject-matter of mathematics” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 55), those corporeal things according to Descartes have a physical substance and are extended; whereas, by contrast, he maintains that “the mind is not an extended thing” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 54), hence

cannot be expressed mathematically, and according to Descartes it is the mind that implies what a person is; for instance, he declared that “I am, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks, that is, I am a mind…” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 32).
Descartes advance a series or arguments to defend his views. Let us review two of them. To start with, he maintains that “the mind it is a non-extended thing” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 54); by contrast, the body is a “extended thing” and “not thinking thing” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p.54); therefore, according to Descartes (1641/1985) “I am distinct from the body and can exist without it” (p.54). The other argument advanced by Descartes is that the mind is indivisible whereas the body is not. He observes that “there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 59), therefore, according to Descartes (1641/1985) the “mind should be different from the body” (p.59)

The overall philosophical Cartesian system is very complex, the mathematical, physical and psychological gives the Cartesian system its strength; however, the problem for the Cartesian mind-body problem is that it is not clear how both substances interact: how something non-physical may causally affect the physical and vice versa.

Descartes suggests that there is a gland inside the brain in charge of the ‘interaction between the non-physical and physical substance, he maintains that “from there it radiates through the rest of the body by means of the animal spirits” (Descartes, 1649/1984, p.341). In other words, Descartes suggests that it is in the pineal gland of the brain that both substances interact. But this explanation does not successfully address the problem of interaction; however, although controversial, the Cartesian’s concepts of ideas, mind, material bodies, the Cartesian plane or person, are still very influential notions in philosophy today. P.F. Strawson reacted against the view of a person that results from this Cartesian view, and proposed quite a different sort of

dualism.

.3.1.3 Strawson and property dualism

A more contemporary version of dualism is property dualism. P. F. Strawson, in the papers “Persons” (1958) and “Self, mind and body” (1966) explores the notion of person. Strawson disagrees with the Cartesian view that a person is just ‘a mind’, and instead proposes that there are two predicates that are equally applicable to the concept of person. Strawson (1958/1991) explicitly says that:
What I mean by a concept of person is the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics, a physical situation, etc, are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type (p.108)

In other words a person is not Cartesian being with two separated substances; rather, a person has both states of consciousness and physical characteristics. This seems to suggest that in Strawson’s view a mind by itself is nothing; it is required to be part of a corporeal being. Thus he explains that:
...a necessary condition of states of consciousness being ascribed at all is that they should be ascribed to the very same things as certain corporeal characteristics, a certain physical situation, etc. That is to say, states of consciousness could not be ascribed at all, unless they are ascribed to persons in the sense I have claimed for this word (Strawson, 1958/1991, p. 108)
Moreover, Strawson (1966/1981) maintains that “the history of human being is not the history of one two-sided thing; it is the history of two one-sided things” (p.58). In other words, as pointed out before, under Strawson’s view a mind cannot exist independently of a physical base or person, this is, according to Strawson (1966/1981) “the concept of a mind is dependent on the concept of a living person” (p.59). This is Strawson’s property dualism, in brief: what defines a subject or a person – or a physical entity – is to have M and P predicates.
The ideas of Strawson are quite influential nowadays; many philosophers, for example Searle (2002), embrace a property dualist position.

However, although Strawson’s views describe the subject in terms of physical and mental, and this view may present an advance from substance dualism (Strawson suggests that the concept of mind should depend on a material base), it is not clear how the M and P predicates interact. Moreover, he seems to suggest that both are independent: “During a lifetime of a human being, two of these things, one of each kind, are peculiarly intimately related; but the intimacy of their union does not count against or diminish the essential independence of their nature” (Strawson, 1966/1981, p.58), thus can be argued that both predicates have a different ontology; in other words if P-properties are non-physical properties of physical subjects what explains their existence and exactly how do they interact with the

M-properties?
Dualism is perhaps the prima facie solution to the mind-body problem. It is an intuitive position, and in fact Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (2007) suggests that “[dualism] seems to come naturally to children” (p.996). However, whether the mind (according to Descartes) can be conceived as a substance, or (according to Strawson) a property, or is an intuition that comes naturally, one of the main questions is how something that is not part of the physical world interacts with the physical world. As living beings we experience such interaction constantly: our beliefs, decisions, and experiences cause the body to move, and when the body is damaged we may feel pain and look for some relief; with the separation of substance or properties comes the problem of interaction, and this problem remains in any form of dualism. If the problem of interaction cannot be solved, this may suggest that something is not right with dualism, and that it is necessary to explore an alternative, physicalism.