On René Descartes' concept of body

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2011

Can we ever truly answer the question, "Who am I?" Moderated by Alex Voorhoeve (London School of Economics), neuro-philosopher Elie During (University of Paris, Ouest Nanterre), cognitive scientist David Jopling (York University, Canada), social psychologist Timothy Wilson (University of Virginia), and ethicist Frances Kamm (Harvard University) examine the difficulty of achieving genuine self-knowledge and how the pursuit of self-knowledge plays a role in shaping the self. Voorhoeve: Many thanks to both the Nour Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences for organizing this event. In a moment, I'll introduce the speakers to you. But first, I'd like to reflect on today's theme, "Beyond 'I think, therefore I am.' " Of course, it comes from René Descartes. Descartes has become a bit of a whipping boy in discussions of the self, for two reasons. The first is his claim that the mind and the body are two completely distinct substances, which of course leads us to wonder how the two could ever interact. And Descartes was frank about the fact that he hadn't really figured that one out. We won't belabor this problem with his substance dualism tonight. The second error attributed to Descartes, which is closer to the heart of what we're interested in today, is mentioned by Tim Wilson at the beginning of his book, Strangers to Ourselves. The purported error is that our thinking and our sensing are always transparent to us. That is to say: we are conscious of what we think and sense. We know what's going on in ourselves, insofar as we're thinking. And you might think that seems pretty plausible. In a moment, we'll get to the bottom of why Tim thinks this is nonetheless mistaken. But first, I want to stress that it doesn't follow that Descartes thought that we were entirely transparent to ourselves. Indeed, he believed some of our motives were unconscious. We know this, because Queen Christina of Sweden wrote to Descartes to ask what "causes.. .often incite us to love one person rather than another before we know their merit." Descartes replied that when we experience a strong sensation, this causes the brain to crease like a piece of paper. And when the stimulus stops, the brain uncreases, but it stays ready to be creased again in the same way. And when a similar stimulus is presented, then we get the same response, because the brain is ready to crease again. And what did he mean by all this? Well, he gave an example. He said that all his life he had had a fetish for cross-eyed women. Whenever he came across a cross-eyed woman, desire would enflame him. And he figured out, he said, after introspection, that this was because his brain had been strongly creased by his first childhood love, who was cross-eyed. Now what's interesting there is that he says there was this unconscious desire moving him quite strongly, of which he became

Translated from: Theo Kobusch: Sein und Sprache: Historische Grundlegung einer Ontologie der Sprache, Leiden – New York – Københaven – Köln 1987, pp. 214–234.

This paper presents a reading of Descartes' Meditations as a work on philosophical logic akin with and comparable to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What Descartes "isolates" in the Cogito is thought. I believe this reading of Descartes' is sound and correct and makes best sense of Descartes' work, and that reading the two works side by side help to clarify perceived problems in both.

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2018

The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian Dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body.

Lexicon Philosophicum, 2022

In this paper, I aim to address a specific issue underpinning Cartesian metaphysics since its first public appearance in the Discourse right up until the Meditations, but which definitely came to the surface in the Second and Fifth Replies. It involves the possibility that to be thinking and to be extended do not actually contrast as two entirely different properties; hence, these two essences cannot serve as the basis for a disjunctive, real distinction between two corresponding substances, the mind and the body. I dub this problem the ‘thinking matter issue.’ I suggest that Descartes’s concerns about the ‘thinking matter issue’ characterizes and structures the entirety of Meditation Two and its connection with Meditation Six, especially in the attempt to covertly implement what I refer to as Descartes’s ‘prejudice strategy.’ The core of the ‘prejudice strategy’ lies in the idea that the ‘thinking matter issue’ is just a false problem, one raised by the inadequate notions of the mind and the body that we apply to this problem. In section 1, I set out the way in which the ‘thinking matter issue’ emerged in Descartes’s philosophy after the first exposition of his metaphysics in the Discourse. Section 2 deals with the new argumentative path Descartes draws for the Meditations and with the new role that he assigns to the inference about the mind’s non-physical nature after the cogito. In section 3, I contend that the ‘prejudice strategy’ structures Meditation Two and, partially, Six. Section 4 shows that Descartes himself reveals this in his Replies to the Second and the Fifth Set of Objections. In section 5, I delve into Descartes’s foundational theory of the ‘prejudice strategy,’ i.e. his theory of infancy as set out especially in the Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections.

Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, edited by Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson. London: Routledge, 2019

This chapter explores some key issues within Descartes’s theory of cognition. The starting-point is a recent interpretation, according to which Descartes is part of a tradition of theorizing about human cognition, beginning from the idea that we are in principle capable of articulating or grasping the basic order of reality. Earlier readings often take Descartes to question whether we have any cognitive access to reality at all. On the new reading, Descartes instead defends a robust conception of our cognitive relation to reality—our cognition needs to be “determined by reality,” as John Carriero puts it. One important element of Carriero’s interpretation is that Descartes’s notion of idea is to be understood along the lines of the Aristotelian doctrine of formal identity between cognizer and cognized. Here it is argued that retaining the latter doctrine faces some difficulties, given the novel conception of the structure of reality defended by Descartes. This chapter proposes that he needs an alternative account of what it is for a cognizer to be determined by reality. Attending to some important differences between the innate idea of extension and that of God, the chapter concludes that Descartes may not have a fully worked-out account of his own. Considering some of the problems inherent in his views can, however, shed light on the, from our contemporary perspective, peculiar role both Spinoza and Leibniz give to God in accounting for cognition.

For Descartes, "all that we know immediately, directly, and without need of demonstration is our own ideas. This is the subjectivistic postulate…Descartes started with his ideas and reasoned to other things, and particularly to the reality of material things...The Wrong Starting Point. With his 'I think' as starting point for an inquiry into knowledge, Descartes started modern philosophy down the road that led inevitably to idealism. The starting point, pure thought, effectively excluded external, non-mental beings from the inquiry right from the start. Every inquiry must begin from something which is evident in itself, and must constantly refer back to this self-evident, just as an army advancing must maintain constant communication with its supply depot. No matter how far the inquiry progresses, it gets its whole force only from the immediate evidents from which it starts. An evident which is entirely subjective, that, within the mind, can never give to an inquiry starting from it the force to get beyond the mind. Consequently, modern philosophy, taking its signal from Descartes, was doomed to end in illusion. Hence, we find repeated, in some form or other, by nearly every major modern philosopher the dictum of Descartes, that all we know immediately and directly are our own ideas. Some, like Descartes himself, tried to show ways in which, from this direct knowledge of our own ideas, we can and do attain certain, though indirect, knowledge of other things. But their attempts are all failures."(BENIGNUS, Nature, Knowledge, and God, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1947, pp. 293, 300). "Con Descartes, la gnoseologia non è più una riflessione metafisica sul fatto della conoscenza delle cose: la conoscenza non ha più come oggetto l'essere delle cose ma le 'idee.'"(A. LIVI, La ricerca della verità, Ed. Leonardo da Vinci, Rome, 2005, p. 47). "The originality of Descartes is to make of thought the point of departure of philosophy, be it subjective (the cogito as act) or objective (the clear idea). In Cartesian philosophy objective thought seems to dominate, which is a new version of the objective concept of the Scholastics. That which is accepted as real is the clear idea, the transparency to the spirit of the present object, removed from every imaginative or sensible element. The idea is that which is known: afterwards, we have to see whether behind this there is a reality, which will be the cause of the idea. In this way a fracture is produced between idea and reality, since the object is not reality, but the latter's representation (Cf. L. POLO, Evidencia y realidad en Descartes, Rialp, Madrid, 1963). Descartes is still a realist, but a mediate realist: one needs to conquer reality with deduction; yet, we do not know how we could truly conceive it, given that we do not conceive anything other than ideas. Therefore, things are not intelligible in themselves, and in reality they are lost, because we only arrive at a thought reality. God, affirms Descartes, 'not having given me any faculty to know what they may be, but on the contrary a very large propensity to believe that the ideas are sent to me, or come from corporeal things, I do not see how one could excuse him from deception, if those ideas were not to proceed from corporeal things. And thus it must be concluded that corporeal things exist'(R. DESCARTES, Medit. 6), albeit recognizing that these reasons are not as firm and evident as those that lead to the knowledge of God and of our soul. We may agree with Gilson: 'either one works from being in a realistic way, and then one will have knowledge, or rather one works from knowledge in the mode of critical idealism, and then one will never reach being.'(É. GILSON, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance, Vrin,

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2003

In this enterprise, I shall present Descartes' theory of 'methodic doubt,' moving systematically as he (Descartes) himself would suppose we do, from the establishment of the being of his thinking self (his soul), through the existence of a non-mischievous, infinitely, perfect Being, God, to the existence of a corporeal, extended substance (his body), as distinct from his mind; and the ultimate interaction of the two distinct and separate substances: mind and body. Also, I shall give a critical evaluation of Descartes' method, bringing into focus the alternative theories of other philosophers aimed at resolving the Cartesian dualism. The scientific standpoint on the issue shall also be considered. Through these analyses, I shall establish the thesis that, the interaction of mind and body is only probable.