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Descartes's Dualism

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Marleen Rozemond's Descartes' Dualism is a solid piece of scholarship but primarily of interest for Descartes scholars. In recent years, a discernible trend in Descartes scholarship has been to argue that Descartes is less innovative and revolutionary than has previously been supposed and to attempt to root his distinctive teachings (and to solve the problems evoked by those teachings) in those of the Scholastics to whose views he was exposed in his youth. One aspect of this view has been a tendency to reinterpret Descartes' doctrine of the mind/body relation, sketched in the sixth meditation and discussed in his letters, most prominently in his first two letters to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia by attempting to show that Descartes held a hylomorphic conception of the human person rather than the traditional substance dualist account. Rozemond's conclusion is that, despite Descartes' use of scholastic terminology (e.g. he refers to the soul as the form of the body) Descartes is not a hylomorphist and remains committed to substance dualism largely because of his overriding commitment to the metaphysical picture dictated by the New Science. I myself am in complete agreement with Rozemond on this point, which after all is the mainstream position in the history of Descartes scholarship.

Although much has been written about what Descartes should have said to Elizabeth about the notorious interaction problem, rather less attention has been paid to what Descartes actual tells her, which is that the way in which body influences mind and mind influences body is a mystery that we have no prospect of understanding, since it is both unique and irreducible: for us, at least, the concept of mind/body interaction is a simple one not further analyzable into parts or explicable in terms of some sort of intervening mechanism. Nevertheless, since sound philosophy establishes that the mind and the body are separate substances of incompatible natures and experience testifies to the fact of mind/body interaction in no uncertain terms, we must simply accept mind/body interaction as a fact. Although Descartes does his best to circumscribe the mystery by localizing it to a single point in the brain (the pineal gland) the fact remains that he has no account of mind/brain interaction to offer and sees no need to offer one. Anyone who has followed the philosophy of mind since Descartes' time is in a position to confirm his view about this; every theory about the relation of mind and body breaks down precisely at the point where this mystery is addressed.

This book s a complete work that explains Descartes' thought of body and mind. This book mainly representates the "strong" dualism, the traditional way to understand Descartes' philosophy.

The book explains also the basic concepts, but mostly it is very advanced philosophy and it is definitely not any kind on basic course.

The book was quite hard to read to me (I am not a native english speaker), so I recommend it especially to people that have a strong background on both philosophy and english language.