The soul-Descartes Flashcards
descartes substance dualism
The theory advocates the mind existing as a distinct substance to the body. Here, the word substance means something that can exist on its own. In other words, Descartes is saying that the mind is an immaterial substance that can exist without the body but which can also interact with it enabling our thoughts to have a causal impact on our body.
what are Descartes three deductive arguments?
Descartes makes his case for the ontological distinction between mind and body through the a priori, offering three deductive arguments: the Real Distinction, The Argument from Conceivability and the Argument from Divisibility
explain The doubt and how Descartes formulated the cogito
He asks, how can sense experience give us true knowledge of the world? How can we be sure this is not a dream state? If we can be so easily deceived by what we ‘see’, then, theoretically we could be deceived about everything. Descartes finds himself in a state of hyperbolic doubt: all knowledge is uncertain. Yet, even in this state of total scepticism, there is one thing he can know for sure: that he is thinking. Even when he doubts, he is thinking because doubting is a form of thinking, and since thinking requires a thinker, he can be certain that he exists as a thinking thing. The physical body can be doubted, but the mind cannot. Thus he forms his conclusion ‘I think therefore I am’
leibniz’z law
Leibniz’s law: two things are the same if and only if they share every property in common. As the mind and body do not have every property in common they are distinct. We experience the mind as immaterial, indivisible, without limit and located nowhere in space, while we experience the body as the exact opposite: material, divisible, located in space and limited in extension.
Descartes’ argument from conceivability
This posits that the mind and body are two distict and separate substances that interact with each other as they can be conceived as such
