Rene Descartes' Dualism

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Can we ever find evidence that support Descartes' dualism in psychology?

-- Ephraim Makeke (makekee@webmail.co.za), August 26, 2003

Answers

Descartes' *substance* dualism was shown to be contrary to the law of the conservation of energy in the 19th century, I believe by Helmholtz, who authored the major paper on the conservation of energy, but I am not positive. Materialistic psychologists (notably behaviorists) are inclined to claim that this disproved *all* forms of dualism. This is simply an elementary philosophical error. There are virtually no *substance* dualists (believing that there are two separate substances -- one mental and one physical) alive today. There are lots of advocates of less pernicious forms of dualism. *Property* dualism is one -- there is one basic kind of subtance, but it displays a number of different properies. Some of these are "physical" properties (e.g., mass) and some are "mental" (e.g., rationality).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), August 26, 2003.

Can we find evidence to support dualism? I believe that the answer is both yes and no. Yes because you can always find scientific or physical evidence of things that are tangible. No because I don't think there will ever be a way to find if the mind is seperate from the brain. But that is what is still being argued today.

-- Laurie Gilbert (mirage727@msn.com), November 05, 2003.

Substance dualism is a rather tricky doctrine. If we take Descartes at face value, he is saying that there are two substances (mind and body) that have NO area of overlap. There is no place or format for these two, entirely oppositely predicated substances, to interact. That said, you are forced to either accept Spinoza's uber-Cartesian answer that there is in fact only one substances (he said the mental ad therefore God, I say the physical and therefore what we call reality) or Leibniz' rather strange doctrine of pre-established harmony (notably that there are a plurality of substances and they don't interact since they are pre-programed at the moment of creation). The only other option that I'm aware of is to reject substance ontology altogether and accept something like Gaddamer's event ontology whereby you step safely away from all of the muddied waters of aristiteleon substance ontology. The short answer: I'm not sure what evidence FOR substance dualism would look like. Philip

-- Philip Bishop (ps_bishop@yahoo.com), December 10, 2003.

Nice answer, Philip. Descartes, of course, had a "solution." The substances were said to be able to interact somehow in exactly one spot -- the pineal gland. What special property the pineal gland was thought to have that would have allowed for the interaction of the two substances is not clear. What is fairly clear, however, is that Descartes picked up the idea from Galen (who presented a suspiciously similar theory in On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (VIII, 14). In old Stoic philosophy, pneuma ("animal spirits" or, as we call it, cerebro-spinal fluid) had a curious ontology halfway between a material and mental substance.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), December 10, 2003.

I was aware of the pineal gland and the best rendition of this curious organ was not done by Descartes but by silly 1950's black and white sci-fi whereby a "pineal gland" grew to unprecedented size and burst forth from the unfortunate soul's head and began rampaging about town causing all sorts of rucus. In other words, the rather slipshod idea of substance dualism isn't saved by an even sloppier solution of the pineal gland. Thank you for mentioning it though. If I remember correctly, Descartes was responding to a young lady of importance in Europe at the time and she didn't think it was a worthy answer either. Philip

-- Philip Bishop (ps_bishop@yahoo.com), July 09, 2004.


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