Descartes Mind Over Matter - 1331 Words

1018 Professor Crowell Phil 21 22 April 2016 Mind over Matter In his meditations Descartes supposed there was two fundamentally different sorts of substances in the universe, physical stuff, which bodies and chairs etc. are made up of; which is extended in space, hence he called it res extensa, but there’s also mind stuff which isn’t in space at all thinking stuff or, res cogitans. Bodies are made of res extensa and minds are made of res cogitans and the two are separate. To understand why he thought this we must go back to his mission statement, which was to doubt everything he could in order to find something indubitable which he thought would be certain knowledge. Descartes found that he could doubt everything except that he was thinking since doubt was a kind of thinking, and since thinking requires a thinker he knew that he must exist hence the famous I think therefore I am syllogism known as the cogito. Descartes goes on to say that he can doubt the existence of his body and all other physical things but he cannot doubt his mind exists because of the cogito. Descartes’ flaw is his liberal use of Leibniz’s law, the identity of indiscernibles. The ontological principle states that there cannot be separate objects or entities that have all of their properties in common. That is to say, if you have two things and they have all the same properties, including their position in space, you don’t really have two things because they are identical; by the same token if twoShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of Elisabeth s Criticism Of Descartes Mind Body Dualism1398 Words   |  6 PagesPrincess Elisabeth’s Criticism of Descartes’ Mind-Body Dualism Renà © Descartes’ seventeenth century philosophy receives much of the credit for the basis of modern philosophy, specifically his argument that the body and the mind are completely separate substances, each with its own independence from the other, also known as dualism. Descartes was educated in the Aristotelian and Greek tradition, and those ideas influenced his dualist thought. 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