Princess Elisabeth

There are two major themes in Descartes’ sixth Meditation, and this is indicated in the sub-title: “The existence of material things, and the real distinction between the mind and body.” The first theme occupied the greater part of the Mediation, and include not just knowledge of the existence of material objects, but questions about what we can do about them. The second theme argues for the immateriality of the mind, and with that, Descartes established his mind/body dualism. This essay, therefore, is a review that focuses on the two major themes with emphases on his main point. His view that the mind and the body are separate entities, but yet interconnected, the body a physical, extended material is dependent on the intellectual operations of the mind which is a nonphysical material with the ability to reason and think, and the consciousness to know that he is thinking. He concludes by arguing that the idea within him of God, not only confirm his existence as a thinking being, but also confirms that there must be a referent, outside of the mind (God) from whom the true essence of the human mind, which is the ability and the power of reason and of judgement came from.

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.

The purpose of the wax argument is designed to provide a clear and distinct knowledge of “I”, which is the mind, while corporeal things, “whose images are framed by thought, and which the senses themselves imagine are much more distinctly known than this mysterious ‘I’ which does not fall within the imagination” (66). Through the wax argument, Descartes’ demonstrates that corporeal things are perceived neither through our senses nor imagination, but through our intellect alone. In this argument, you will see that there is cause to doubt Descartes’ analysis of the wax and his method of philosophical reasoning.

Topic: How does Descartes argue that mind and body are distinct? Is he right? Am I real, or imaginary? In the First Meditation, Rene Descartes presents the main falsehoods in which he believed during his life, and the subsequent faultiness he experienced concerning the body of knowledge. The philosopher considers that it is never too late to rethink the knowledge about his personal being from the very foundations, and builds his thoughts on a certain ground starting from common things. It would be impossible to doubt each thing separately, so he expresses his doubt to the basic principles of knowledge he has already gained, since a conclusion would surely be doubted if its premise was doubted. He starts by doubting basic senses, by comparing feels in reality vs. in dreams. For example, even if I consciously feel warm when I am walking in the sun, I could not claim that I am hundred-­‐percentage sure I am awake, since I would feel it the same way when I was in dreams. Descartes presents this idea to show the doubt of reality and its elements. Also, he concludes that the common things we perceive are fashioned, and knowledge based on that can be doubted, such as physics and astronomy. This category of knowledge are different from geometry and arithmetic, which contain certain and definiteness in the simplest thing. By doubting the sense and knowledge based on it, Descartes argued his approach that the body and mind are two absolutely distinctive things. Descartes mentions God

Summary: The problem of the soul continues as Descartes suggested that the human is composed of two completely different substances; a physical body which Descartes compares with a machine, and a non-physical mind, related to the soul, that allows humans to think and feel even if it has no “measurable dimensions” (67). But Elizabeth put in doubt his ideologies when she realized that a non-physical thing doesn’t have the strength to push and move the body. This led to several questions unanswered and also let space for other materialist theories such as behaviorism, mind-brain identity, and functionalism, which also fail in offering an explicit solution.

Rene Descartes was a complex man who had questions about God and the human soul, and preferred to work through problems by eliminating all doubt with a particular issue. He works to prove that God exists and develops arguments to point out the limits between the mind or soul and the body, as well as, corporeal (physical) and incorporeal (mental) properties. When Descartes refers to mental properties, he is alluding to thoughts and emotions. When mentioning physical properties, he is talking about the brain. Hence, mind-body

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.

The Princess Palatine of Bohemia, Elisabeth has been well known for her philosophical writings that were constituted from her correspondence with René Descartes. “In that correspondence, Elisabeth presses Descartes on the relation between the two really distinct substances of mind and body, and in particular the possibility of their causal interaction and the nature of their union. They also correspond on Descartes's physics, on the passions and their regulation, on the nature of virtue and the greatest good, on the nature of human freedom of the will and its compatibility with divine causal determination, and on political philosophy” (Shapiro). In respond to Elisabeth's request for more information on the interaction between the passion and the immaterial mind, Descartes wrote The Passions of the Soul. However in the end, Descartes ended his letter by lecturing Elizabeth as being too philosophical because he could not come up with a clear and direct answer.

Descartes’ Meditation 6 explains the distinction between the mind and body. He explains that he is confused as to why his mind is attached to a particular body to which he calls his own. He questions why pain or tickling happens in his own body but does not occur in any body outside of his own and why a tugging feeling in his stomach tells him that he is hungry and that he should eat. From this, he perceives that he is only a thinking thing. The idea of a body is merely extended and the mind is

When Princess Elisabeth questioned Descartes on the possibility of interaction between heterogeneous substances [AT III 661]., he answered recognizing that through his works, he had not said much about the union of mind and body. In his letter [21-05-1643] Descartes justifies this saying he had been primarily focused in the demonstration of the distinction between mind and body.

The concept of mind and body interactions has been debated among many modern philosophers. Some believe that our minds and bodies are different things, thus existing separately, while others believe that they exist as a whole. In this paper, I will be introducing two rationalist philosophical views regarding this topic, one which is by Rene Descartes and the other by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Rationalists, in philosophical terms, are the ones who obtain their knowledge through reasoning rather than the human senses. Descartes and Leibniz both have similar perspectives, but Leibniz takes a slightly different approach to improve Descartes’ argument. This paper will first show Descartes’ original argument, an example that proves the argument to be invalid, and then lastly, a revised version of the argument with Leibniz’s help.

and this quantity of motion is “the product of its speed and its size” (Descartes, 1644/2012, p.33), but the conception of speed used by Descartes is an scalar rather than considered as a vector like velocity (as modern development shows (Gerald Holton and Stephen G. Brush , 2001, p. 210)), nonetheless Descartes suggests that “the mind does not directly move the external limbs, but simply controls the animal spirits which flow from the heart via the brain into the muscles, and sets up certain motions in them..” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 161), and this allow the interaction of substances in Cartesian terms, in other words, according to Descartes, the soul only change the direction of the body, but cannot add motion to the physical bodies; however, this is the problem of the interaction in Cartesian terms: as Dennett explain “any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy” (Dennett, 1991, p. 35), thus, the Cartesian explanation should violate the laws of physics, in other words as Dennett asks “…where is this energy to come from?” (Dennett, 1990, p.35), and this energy cannot come from a

In this essay I will discuss Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism inside the mind-body problem. First, allow me to explain what the mind-body problem is. In ancient philosophy, mind and body were named as one of the most famous cases of dualisms, such as monism versus pluralism or the ephemeral versus eternal. Nowadays, when seen together, they are centered more on the concept of the mind rather than anything else. The information contained in the mind, being different from the physical brain. René Descartes is the one to who we trace the mind-body concept as a “problem”, he asked “how the immaterial mind (or soul) could influence the material body” , along other questions that compromised what was known of the connection between the mind and the body themselves.

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.

In Meditation Six entitled “Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and Real Distinction between the Mind and Body”, one important thing Descartes explores is the relationship between the mind and body. Descartes believes the mind and body are separated and they are two difference substances. He believes this to be clearly and distinctly true which is a Cartesian quality for true knowledge. I, on the other hand, disagree that the mind and body are separate and that the mind can exist without the body. First, I will present Descartes position on mind/body dualism and his proof for such ideas. Secondly, I will discuss why I think his argument is weak and offer my own ideas that dispute his reasoning while I keep in mind how he might