Question:

a)        How, according to Matthews, does Descartes’ new concept of mind differ from that of his Aristotelian predecessors?

        b)        Explain any potential problems that Cartesianism gives rise to.

According to Gareth B. Matthews, Descartes new concept of the mind differed from that of his Aristotelian predecessors by way of his rejection of two traditional views.  As Matthews writes in his work Consciousness and Life (1977) ‘The traditional connection he [Descartes] rejected is that between thinking, or being conscious, and living.’  ‘The traditional separation he rejected is the separation of living things and mechanisms…’.

Aristotle declared that all living things had matter and form.  Matter was just stuff and had no properties, it was just what something is made from.  The properties of a living thing amounted to its form, and its form was equivalent to its soul.  For example, a plant’s properties are that it feeds and reproduces.  These properties are it’s form and it’s form is it’s soul.  The kind of soul a being had made it what it was.  The soul, for Aristotle, was what made something alive and because a soul is necessary for life on this view, this makes a distinction between living things and other things.

For Aristotle and his followers, there were three tiers of the soul.  Plants and such like, which have the basic properties of being able to feed and reproduce, have what they called a vegetative soul.  Animals can also feed and reproduce, but they have other properties too, such as they can feel pain and can remember.  Animals then, had what Aristotelians called a sensitive soul; a more complicated soul, or a more complicated form, due to the additional properties of the being in question.  The top tier was what they called the intellectual soul and this was mainly attributed to human beings, as it involved reasoning.  Some other animals may also come under the category of having an intellectual soul, such as an ape, or a dog, or a dolphin for example.  

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Further, according to Matthews, Aristotle would have probably found it natural to believe that to be alive was to be conscious as there did not even seem to be a word in his language for consciousness, and so Aristotelians made no distinction between the two concepts.  Therefore, the connection between life and consciousness was made automatically.

Descartes saw the soul in a completely different way to his Aristotelian predecessors.  According to Matthews, he rejected the traditional connection between consciousness and life by reallocating most of what Aristotelians called form or properties to the body.  Digestion, reproduction, sensing and ...

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