Dualism And Rene Cartes's Meditations On First Philosophy By Rene Descartes

In his Meditations Rene Descartes aimed to reconstruct the whole of science by trying to prove the distinction between mind and matter. He gives an argument from doubt, and another from conceivability. I will give a brief summary of the foundations Descartes builds his thesis on, and then looking at his arguments and whether they are capable of persuading us that dualism is a logical stance to hold.

In this paper, I will discuss the “Divisibility argument” on Descartes mind- body dualism presented on Descartes meditations. I will claim that the mind and the body are in fact different as Descartes argument suggests, but I will more rather neglect and explain why his belief that the mind is indivisible is wrong. I also will discuss how Descartes argument on the body’s divisibility is reasonable, and the reasons why I believe this argument is true.

Descartian dualism is one of the most long lasting legacies of Rene Descartes’ philosophy. He argues that the mind and body operate as separate entities able to exist without one another. That is, the mind is a thinking, non-extended entity and the body is non-thinking and extended. His belief elicited a debate over the nature of the mind and body that has spanned centuries, a debate that is still vociferously argued today. In this essay, I will try and tackle Descartes claim and come to some conclusion as to whether Descartes is correct to say that the mind and body are distinct.

Rene Descartes’ third meditation from his book Meditations on First Philosophy, examines Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God. The purpose of this essay will be to explore Descartes’ reasoning and proofs of God’s existence. In the third meditation, Descartes states two arguments attempting to prove God’s existence, the Trademark argument and the traditional Cosmological argument. Although his arguments are strong and relatively truthful, they do no prove the existence of God.

In Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, he introduces the divisibility argument for his idea of mind-body dualism. It argues that the mind is distinct from the body and that they are different "substances". The argument has two premises; the mind is indivisible and the body is divisible. In this essay, I will interpret Descartes' argument by discussing the key points of these premises and how they are supported. I will also be incorporating my own thoughts on the argument to determine whether the divisibility argument is enough to validate the idea of mind-body dualism.

In the first meditation, "Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", Descartes main goal is to distinguish what it is he can take to be true, and what supposed truths hold even the smallest degree of doubt. When he reviews all of his opinions he concludes "eventually [he] is forced to admit that there is nothing among the things [he]believed to be true which it is not permissable to doubt--and not out of frivolity or lack of forethought, but for valid and considered reasons. Thus [he] must be no less careful to withhold assent henceforth even from these beliefs then [he] would from those that are patently false, if [he wishes] to find anything certain."(Pg62) At the beginning of Descartes' meditations, he finds that there is really no concrete pillars of knowledge to base the foundations of his supposed

In Meditation six: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body, Rene Descartes wrote of his distinctions between the mind and the body, first by reviewing all things that he believed to be true, then assessing the causes and later calling them into doubt, and then finally by considering what he must now believe. By analyzing Descartes’ writing, this paper will explicate Descartes’ view on bodies and animals, and if animals have minds. Before explicating the answer to those questions, Descartes’ distinctions between the mind and the body should first be summarized and explained.

The philosophical thought is that the mind and body are two separate things; with one being able to exist without the other has caused much discussion and debate among philosophers and theologians over the years. René Descartes and Plato, two well-known philosophers, argue that people have a mind or soul, which is somehow connected with the body, but the mind or soul can exist independently from our body. Descartes introduces the mind-body argument while Plato presents the soul-body argument. Although the arguments differ in some ways, Descartes and Plato also have similar opinions on the issue. As a person of faith, there is some difficulty in explaining to a non-believer that when a person dies, the soul does not perish with the body. While siding with Descartes and his belief in a perfect God, this essay seeks to review the issues of dualism and meditation, through the eyes of Descartes and Plato.

René 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. In Meditations, Descartes focused on dualism in the context of human consciousness. While the work is organized in separate ‘Meditations’, and Descartes’ main motivation for writing it was likely philosophical exploration, there are mentions of God in the part of Meditations on dualism, because the separation of mind and body often leads to the necessity of the existence of a soul, and therefore gave itself nicely to a seventeenth-century theology. Despite its organic religious affiliation, Meditations was not universally agreed upon, or even well liked, specifically by people who believed that the body and the mind, everything that makes up a person, is the same physical substance. Among these disbelievers in Cartesian dualism was Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, a staunch materialist who responded to Descartes’ work through a series of letters. Elisabeth’s doubts of Descartes’ dualism remain one of the greatest arguments against substance dualism.

Descartes believed that if he doubted all things, he could find the truth. In the Meditations, he commited himself to free his mind of all that he believed to be true. He started with the five senses. The senses are deceptive and we can never trust them completely. Therefore, we have to throw out all knowledge of them.

But Descartes first starts of the meditation by acknowledging that he is in a fact, a living thing, that can think, and even have doubt. After acknowledging things, he then starts to question what he knows, as if can he can be certain that what he sees and knows is true.” The first instance of knowledge, there is nothing but a certain clear and distinct perception of what I affirm. Yet this will hardly be enough to render me certain of the truth of things if it could ever happen that something I perceived so clear and distinctly was false” (24). He was stating that with knowledge, things seem to be clear and distinct but he has perceived things as clear and distinct before and it wasn’t true.

ABSTRACT: Cartesian dualism and the union of mind and body are often understood as conceptions that contradict each other. Diachronic interpretations maintain that Descartes was first a dualist (in the Meditations) and later on developed his stance on the union of mind and body (Passions). Some authors find here a problem without solution. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, some interpretations have been developed intending to give a positive solution to the difficult relation between Cartesian dualism and the union of mind and body. The problem that I find in most of them is that they try to show no incoherence between Descartes' dualism and his conception of the union and

In Meditation I, Descartes discusses those things that can be called into doubt. He starts off by talking about how he has been mislead by his beliefs before, so will start off by separating those beliefs that cause him to doubt. He would like to secure his foundational beliefs similar to a house, without a secure foundation, the house can fall.

In his first meditation, Descartes sets out with amazing clarity and persistence to clear himself of every false idea that he has acquired previous to this, and determine what he truly knows. To rid him of these "rotten apples" he has developed a method of doubt with a goal to construct a set of beliefs on foundations which are indubitable. On these foundations, Descartes applies three levels of skepticism, which in turn, generate three levels at which our thoughts may be deceived by error. Descartes states quite explicitly in the synopsis, that we can doubt all things which are material as long as "we have no foundations for the sciences other than those which we have had up till now"(synopsis:12). This

This paper will attempt to explain Descartes’ first argument for the distinction that exists between mind and body. Dualism is a necessary aspect of Descartes’ metaphysics and epistemology. This distinction is important within the larger framework of Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) because after doubting everything (body, extension, senses, etc.), Descartes comes to the conclusion that because he doubts, he must be a thinking thing and therefore exist (p.43). This means that the mind must be separate and independent from the body. One can doubt that the body exists while leaving the mind intact. To doubt that the mind exists, however, is contradictory. For if the mind does not exist, how, or with what, is that doubt being accomplished.