Descartes’s Theory of Mind
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loginThere is a standard account of Cartesian dualism that is so familiar that it almostneeds no introduction. According to this account, human beings are composedof two distinct substances, a material substance and an immaterial substance,and the latter is a necessary and sufficient condition for (most) mental events.Despite its familiarity and longevity, however, there are good reasons to doubtthat Descartes ever proposed such a theory as an explanationof the humanmind. The most fundamental reason for doubting the standard account wasmade explicit in one of Hobbes’s objections to the Meditations. The Englishphilosopher had been convinced that Descartes was an unrelenting critic of thestyle of explanation used by scholastic philosophers, and he drew the conclu-sion that such explanations are irremediably flawed even in metaphysics.
