Rene Descartes Meditations On First Philosophy Analysis

In the history of philosophy one of the most influential dualist views of the mind-body problem was put forward by Rene Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Descartes supposed that the world was made up of mental and physical substances that were fundamentally distinct. Whereas physical substances were thought to be spatial and accessible to every being in the material world, mental substances were indivisible, private and not restricted to space so that humans could even image themselves existing without a body.

Although completely different, Descartes argued that mind and body substances were able to causally interact (Hoffman, 1986). So, for example, if John were to place his hand on a hot stove (a material event involving material objects such as the hot stove and John’s hand), a mental event of feeling pain would occur. This would be followed by another mental event, the desire to take his hand off the hot stove, leading to the material event of taking his hand off the hot stove. According to Descartes, signals were passed between John’s brain and mind through the pineal gland- a mass of tissue at the centre of the brain where the mind-body interaction takes place (Descartes, 1649). The conclusion follows that while separate, mind and body affect
22), Descartes’ ideas about the mind have been widely disregarded. As Young (1990) notes, it is unclear how a nonphysical substance and a physical substance can interact in a world in which every event is caused by some other material event. Claiming that a mental event could cause or affect a material event would violate the laws of nature “which we have excellent independent reason to accept” (Heil, 2004, p.