Cartesian dualism

Cartesian dualism was Descartes's principle of the separation of mind and matter and mind and body. The mind, according to Descartes, was a "thinking thing", and an immaterial substance. This "thing" was the essence of himself, the part that doubts, believes, hopes, and so on. The body is a material substance.

Related Topics:
Descartes - Mind - Matter - Body

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The central claim of Cartesian dualism is that the immaterial mind and the material body causally interact, a point which is featured prominently in non-European philosophies, such as in Tibetan Buddhism. Mental events cause physical events, and vice versa. This leads to the most substantial claim against Cartesian dualism - the Cartesian gap. How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body, and vice versa? This is called the "problem of interactionism." Descartes himself struggled to come up with a feasible explanation for the problem - he suggested that animal spirits interacted in the pineal gland. This has since been widely dismissed.

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For this reason and others, most professional philosophers and scientists have abandoned this view and proffer other accounts of the mental. For example, mind-body problem presents competing philosophical positions and cognitive science generally assumes that mind is constructed from matter; that it is, for example a Category of correspondences among pieces of matter.

Related Topics:
Mind-body problem - Cognitive science

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