Rene Descartes
...the main branch of philosophy because the key questions,
“why do I know?” and “what is self?” cannot be fully answered until looked at from a
social and political point of view. In the field of Epistemology, Descartes was considered
a rationalist who believed in a priori knowledge. These two fields are where Descartes
had the most influence on his peers and philosophers of today.
Under metaphysics, Descartes studied the concept of reality and its effect on
people’s lives. Descartes was a dualist whose view was that the world consists of two
different components. In his conception, the soul, which to him was an entity separate
from the body and living in the pituitary gland, might or might not be aware of the body,
but when awareness did occur, there was a sensation of the body affecting the mind.
Descartes called this Cartesian interactionist dualism. Mind could affect the body by
means of the soul initiating an involuntary action. Descartes felt that the mind and body
connect. The term dualism refers to the view that the world is made up of two categories,
which are incomparable. Dualists believe that the central quality of the mind is that they
are thinking; while the central quality of the material things is that they are extended. By
extended, they mean that material substances take up space and can be classified
according to length, width and breadth. The Cartesian solution to the mind-body problem
is to insist that the mental representation, though caused by the physical, does not
resemble the physical. Better put, what you see in your mind’s eye is not necessarily what
your body experiences.
Descartes seemed hazy when he said the two categories in which the world is
made of are incomparable. How can two things that reside in the same place and have an
effect on only one...
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