Cartesian Dualism: The Nature Of Mind And Body

The tone for much discussion, over the last 400 years, of the nature of mind and body was certainly set by Descartes. Cartesian dualism postulated an apparently unbridgeable gap between minds and bodies which drove some thinkers to materialism, others to idealism. 20th century thinkers have developed sophisticated versions of materialism, aided by recent discoveries about the nervous systems and the brain.
Some 20th century materialists have argued that mental states are identical with states of the brain, or reducible to them, in a way analogous to the way clouds are “reducible” to water droplets, or nations to individual citizens. Others have argued for the possibility of eliminating all references to thoughts and other mental notions in