Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Descartes set the tone for the modern discussion of the relation of minds to bodies. According to Descartes, minds and bodies are distinct kinds of substance . (In this context, a substance should be thought of, not as a kind of stuff, something that might stain your shirt or stick to the bottom of your shoe, for instance, but as a particular object or entity: the tree outside your window, a pebble, the Moon, your right ear.) Bodies, Descartes thought, are spatially extended substances, incapable of feeling or thought; minds, in contrast, are unextended, thinking, feeling substances. You might be led to such a view by considering mental and physical characteristics. These seem vastly different on the face of it. States of mind exhibit qualities that appear to fall outside the physical realm: a feeling you have when you bump your elbow, the smell of peat, the sound of a mosquito circling your head seem to differ qualitatively from anything belonging to the physical world. The causes of these experiences are perfectly unexceptional physical occurrences. The mental effects of these causes, however — their appearances — seem to include qualities not locatable in the physical world. For their part, physical bodies exhibit characteristics that appear decisively non-mental. A stone has a particular size, shape, mass, and definite spatial location. Sensations and thoughts, in contrast, ... log in or subscribe to read full text