What Are The Attractions of Dualism? What Are Its Defects? What Are The Alternatives?

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What Are The Attractions of Dualism?  What Are Its Defects? What Are The Alternatives?

        

Descartes posits in the sixth meditations that the mind and body are distinct.  There are three possible arguments for the distinction between the mind and the body.  These are the arguments from doubt, clear and distinct perceptions and the divisibility argument.  Arnauld manages to refute these arguments by applying the Pythagorean principle of the triangle.

Although Descartes’ arguments for dualism do not seem to hold water, it has managed to grab the attention of philosophers, both current and Descartes’ contemporaries.  Cartesian dualism therefore provides a platform for debate.   According to Norman Malcolm, we cannot disregard the dualism just because the arguments are not valid.  “…But even if none of Descartes’ argument in support of his mind-body dualism is valid, this does not disprove the dualism” .  This is because there are some facets of the Cartesian argument for dualism that suggests a possible distinction between the mind and body.  There are mental activities that have no effects on the body.  There are thoughts and decision making processes that go on in our minds without any corresponding reactions in the body.  For instance, when I decide to open a bank account or visit a friend the next day, there are no physical reactions that portray the internal decision process that went on.  This may be an indication that the mind and body are indeed independent.  But one possible objection to this argument is that there are usually some physical signals that shows that a person is thinking or is in a decision making process.  Yes it is true that these may not be as conspicuous as the bodily reactions that result from one sensing hunger and decides to eat or our reflex actions.  Yet things like grimacing or smiling semi-consciously while one is thinking could be said to prove that the mind and body are not independent entities.        

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Perhaps what has attracted many philosophers to the Cartesian dualism is not its validity but the potential possibility of a mind-body dualism.  To be sure, Descartes believed that in reality a human being is an “intimate union of mind and body” .  In sixth meditations he says, “I know that everything which I clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God so as to correspond exactly with my understanding of it.  Hence the fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one thing from another is enough to make me certain that the two things are distinct, ...

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