Lecture 20 Notes

A.   Taking Stock: Where is Descartes at opening of Meditation VI?

• Descartes is a thing which thinks - Meditation II.
  
• He has proven that there is a God who is all good - Meditation III.
  
• He has proven that what he perceives clearly and distinctly is true - Meditations III and V.
  
• He has still has not dispelled much of the doubt of Meditation I.  He doesn’t yet know whether there are bodies, so he doesn’t yet know whether he has a body.  As a result, he doesn’t yet know whether his mind interacts with a body, and thus doesn’t yet know whether what bodily sensations reveal to his mind is accurate to the way the world is.
• The Task of Meditation 6 is to dispel these remaining doubts.  There are two obstacles: (1) Mind-Body Interaction and (2) Personal Immortality.  Descartes must give a plausible account of (1) without giving up (2).

B.    Mind-Body Interaction

• Your Body and Your Thought Interact in Complex Ways.
  

1. CASE 1: reading about something that makes you angry.  You see letters, understand words, and feel anger in thought and body.
   
2. CASE 2: sexual desire.  Your thoughts and bodily sensations build on or quell one another.
   
3. CASE 3: recognizing sight of a familiar face.  Your sensation, memory, judgment work together immediately.
   

• Your body interacts with your thought, not someone else’s.  There is a clear union of your body and what does your thinking.
  
• Questions:
  

1. What is the nature of this union?
   
2. How are things united: your body and what does your thinking?  How are they related to you?
   
3. Are you one, not other?  Are you the union?
   

C.    Descartes could begin by trying to account for the union and defend either:

• "Materialism" = "Mr. Data" View
  

1. What does your thinking is itself a body-part, e.g. brain.  What is usually called your 'mind' is just is that body-part. What you are just is that body, part of which does thinking.
   
2. But how can a body-part, a piece of matter, think?  If we understood how pieces of matter interact, would we really understand thinking? Can some pieces of matter, us on this view, really understand how other pieces interact?
   

• Aquinas’s View
  

1. You are the union of immaterial soul and material body.  What does your thinking is a part of your soul.  Your soul just is a thing that can form union with body.
   
2. But, as with the Mr. Data view, so with this, how do you survive death?
   

• The Mr. Data View and Aquinas's View surmount obstacle (1), trip up on obstacle (2).
  

D.    Descartes adopts neither "Mr. Data View" nor "Aquinas’s View"

• You are a thinking thing, see Meditation 2.  What does your thinking is "really distinct" from a body (51).  What does your thinking is different kind of thing from body.  Therefore you are "really distinct" from a body.  Therefore you can exist without a body, at least by God’s power.
  
• Descartes can surmount obstacle (2), but what of (1)?  How can Descartes account for mind-body interaction? for the union it seems to imply?  How can two things that are "really distinct" form a union?  How can they form a union necessary for reliable sensation?  Descartes tries gamely, with the help of God and the pineal gland.
• Consensus: he has at least as much trouble with obstacle (1) as Aquinas and Data do on obstacle (2).
  

A.   Cartesian Skepticism.

• Descartes is not the first philosopher to cast all beliefs into doubt.  But the doubt of the First Meditation has captivated philosophers since.
  

1. Some argue, as we saw, that Cartesian doubt unintelligible.
   
2. Others, taken with the thought that it is possible, have tried to determine how we can know anything at all.
   

• Why should this be?  A crude conjecture:
  

1. Recall that Descartes lived at dawn of modern science modern science: the science of matter in motion.
   
2. This raises a "Paradox of Science", at the heart of modern philosophy: "How can humans be objects and practitioners of science?"  If we are objects, then humans are material.  But then how can we think? On the other hand, if we are practioners, then we are immaterial things.  But then how can we be known?
   
3. Descartes was the first to appreciate paradox and try to tackle it.  It is a paradox other philosophers have tried to solve since.
   

B.   Cartesian Dualism

• The "Paradox of Science" as Descartes addresses it depends upon the assumption that a thinking thing is not a material thing.  Thinking is activity of the mind not, the body.
  

1. This is the claim Descartes endorses in Meditation 6.
   
2. It relies on the conclusion, "I [am] distinct from my body" (Meditation 6, Paragraph 9).
   
3. I must be my soul and not my body if I am to survive death.
   
4. Yet Descartes recognizes this and defends the claim that he has a body.
   

• Dualism is the view that human beings are of dual composition.  This thesis has two parts: First: human = mind + body.  Second: mind and body are really distinct.  The legacy of this view:
  

1. Everyone agrees that human beings are really one substance.  A human being is not a "ghost in a machine".  But how are these two aspects united to form a unity?  How can minds and body interact in sensation? 
   
2. Despite these puzzles and problems, dualism is another of Descartes’s legacies to modern philosophy.
   

Next Time: Begin looking at Hobbes, who gave modern political philosophy its start.