Blackwell Reference Online

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Human beings, and perhaps other creatures, have minds as well as bodies. But what is a mind, and what is its relation to body, or to the physical in general? The first answer to the mind-body question proposed since medieval times was that of Descartes, who held that minds are wholly distinct from bodies and from physical objects of any sort. According to Cartesian dualism , minds are purely spiritual and radically non-spatial, having neither size nor location. On this view, a normal living human being or person is a duality, a mind and a body paired (though there can be bodies without minds, and minds can survive the destruction of their corresponding bodies). Mysteriously, despite the radical distinctness of minds from bodies, they interact causally: bodily happenings cause sensations and experiences and thoughts in one's mind; conversely, mental activity leads to action and speech, causing the physical motion of limbs or lips. Cartesian dualism has strong intuitive appeal, since from the inside our minds do not feel physical at all; and we can easily imagine their existing disembodied or, indeed, their existing in the absence of any physical world whatever. And until the 1950s, in fact, the philosophy of mind was dominated by Descartes's “first-person” perspective, our view of ourselves from the inside. With few exceptions, philosophers had accepted the following claims: (1) ... log in or subscribe to read full text