This paper will address the Mind/Body Dualism by comparing and contrasting Cartesian rationalism and empiricism and the responses to the Mind/Body Problem by comparing contrasting Kantian Idealism and Phenomenology. It will explain how each attempt to respond/resolve the mind/body problem confronted by both empiricists and rationalists and my own philosophical response to this epistemological problem by sharing my own views are similar to the theories. Cartesian rationalism differentiates between a priori and empirical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is derived through senses dependent upon the components in the external universe. Cartesian method bases its foundation on metaphysical and epistemological thinking. Their idea of knowledge was …show more content…
Human intelligence went only as far as what God chose to reveal regarding his and human existence (Britannica, 2015). Cartesian assumed two ontological dualisms that included the mind and matter. Self-conscious thinking was considered the essences of the mind. We acquire knowledge by meditating on innate ideas of God, mind, and matter. The theory of dualism of mind and matter presents a problem regarding knowledge and interaction. Since mind and matter are very different, the body triggers the mind to have sensible ideas (Britannica, 2015). According to the Cartesians the mind and body connect to one another. It was believed that we experience interactions only under God's provisions, even if we do not know why. Rohault spoke on behalf of the Cartesians in asserting that God makes ideas exemplify material bodies without any resemblance connecting them or any explanation. By the above examples the Cartesians are viewed as a relinquishing philosophy for theology and mysticism (Philosophy Pages, 2015). Cartesians believed that the mind or soul is an element existing only in itself. It was seen as being an independent matter, giving them the capability of explaining immortality without relying on the uncertain theories that the soul is a …show more content…
Innate knowledge is not absorbed by sense experience or deduction and intuition. It is view as being part of our human nature. Experiences assist in processing knowledge of awareness. However, experiences do not give us the knowledge itself. It is perceived to have always been with us deriving from the idea of human nature. Some rationalists believe that this knowledge is obtained as an early existence. However, some philosophers believe that God gave it to us through creation. Others claim it to be from natural selection (Stanford,
Regardless of the disagreement between both schools of philosophy that Rene Descartes and David Hume founded, Descartes’s rationalism and Hume’s empiricism set the tone for skepticism regarding knowledge. Rene Descartes rationalism served to form a solid foundation for true knowledge. Although Descartes reaches an illogical conclusion, his rationalism was meant to solve life’s problem by trusting and using the mind. David Hume’s empiricism serves to be the true blueprint on how humans experience the mind. Hume’s empiricism shows that the world only observes the world through their own sense and that there are no a priori truths. For that reason it became clearer that David Hume’s empiricism explains and demonstrates that it is the better way
The philosophical theory of dualism holds that mind and body are two separate entities. While dualism presupposes that the two ‘substances’ may interact, it contrasts physicalism by refusing to denote correlation between body and mind as proof of identity. Comparing the two theories, dualism’s invulnerable proof of the existence of qualia manages to evade arguments from physicalism. While a common argument against qualia—non-physical properties defined in Jackson’s Knowledge Argument—targets the unsound nature of epiphenomenalism, this claim is not fatal to the theory of dualism as it contains claims of causation and fails to stand resolute to the conceivability of philosophical zombies. This essay argues that epiphenomenalism, while often designated as a weakness when present in an argument, can remain in valid arguments from qualia.
Richard Taylor explained why the body and the mind are one, and why they are not two separate substances. In the article “The Mind as a Function of the Body”, Taylor divides his article in a number of sections and explains clearly why dualism, or the theory that the mind and the body are separate is not conceivable. In one of these sections it is explained in detail the origin of why some philosophers and people believe in dualist metaphysics. As stated by Taylor “when we form an idea of a body or a physical object, what is most likely to come to mind is not some person or animal but something much simpler, such as a stone or a marble”(133). The human has the tendency to believe a physical object as simple, and not containing anything complex. A problem with believing this is that unlike a stone or a marble a human (or an animal) has a brain and the body is composed of living cells (excluding dead skin cells, hair, and nails which are dead cells). The f...
The debate between rationalist and empiricist philosophers looks at the nature of knowledge, and specifically, how we gain this knowledge. Rationalists and empiricists take opposite, and sometimes mutually exclusive, views on how knowledge is obtained.
Rationality is this idea by Weber that it is potentially what created capitalism. Formal rationality is the set of pre-determined criteria that we use to make decisions and conduct activities. He basically says that as humans, we set goals for ourselves and we take whatever steps necessary to reach those goals. These steps though, have to be rational i.e. they are based off of our past experiences, logic or even science. Weber best describes this through the Protestant Ethic, in which he speaks of traditional capitalism, and rational capitalism.
With rationalism, believing in innate ideas means to have ideas before we are born.-for example, through reincarnation. Plato best explains this through his theory of the forms, which is the place where everyone goes and attains knowledge before they are taken back to the “visible world”. Innate ideas can explain why some people are just naturally better at some things than other people are- even if they have had the same experiences.
Rationalism derives from the idea that accepts the supremacy of reason, as opposed to blind faith, and aims at establishing a system of philosophy, values, and ethics that are verifiable by experience, independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority. The principle doctrine of rationalism holds that the source of knowledge is reason and logic. Thus, rationalism is contrasted with the idea that faith, revelation and religion are also valid sources of knowledge and verification. Rationalists, in this context, prioritize the use of reason and consider reason as being crucial in investigating and understanding the world, and they reject religion on the grounds that it is unreasonable. Rationalism is in contradistinction to fideism;
The desire to avoid dualism has been the driving motive behind much contemporary work on the mind-body problem. Gilbert Ryle made fun of it as the theory of 'the ghost in the machine', and various forms of behaviorism and materialism are designed to show that a place can be found for thoughts, sensations, feelings, and other mental phenomena in a purely physical world. But these theories have trouble accounting for consciousness and its subjective qualia. As the science develops and we discover facts, dualism does not seems likely to be true.
The source of knowledge is not a topic that is universally agreed upon. To rationalists, who usually have a sense of the divine, innate ideas give them cause to base knowledge in reason, being derived from ideas. To empiricists, who do not hold innate ideas to be valid, knowledge is unearthed through the senses, derived from observations. The presence of a concept of the divine is the deciding factor of whether knowledge originates from the senses or the ideas.
...of the body, and no problem arises of how soul and body can be united into a substantial whole: ‘there is no need to investigate whether the soul and the body are one, any more than the wax and the shape, or in general the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter; for while “one” and “being” are said in many ways, the primary [sense] is actuality’ (De anima 2.1, 12B6–9).Many twentieth-century philosophers have been looking for just such a via media between materialism and dualism, at least for the case of the human mind; and much scholarly attention has gone into asking whether Aristotle’s view can be aligned with one of the modern alternatives, or whether it offers something preferable to any of the modern alternatives, or whether it is so bound up with a falsified Aristotelian science that it must regretfully be dismissed as no longer a live option.
Are minds physical things, or are they nonmaterial? If your beliefs and desires are caused by physical events outside of yourself, how can it be true that you act the way you do of your own free will? Are people genuinely moved by the welfare of others, or is all behavior, in reality, selfish? (Sober 203). These are questions relevant to philosophy of the mind and discussed through a variety of arguments. Two of the most important arguments with this discussion are Cartesian dualism and logical behaviorism, both of which argue the philosophy of the mind in two completely different ways. Robert Lane, a professor at the University of West Georgia, define the two as follows: Cartesian dualism is the theory that the mind and body are two totally different things, capable of existing separately, and logical behaviorism is the theory that our talk about beliefs, desires, and pains is not talk about ghostly or physical inner episodes, but instead about actual and potential patterns of behavior. Understanding of the two arguments is essential to interpret the decision making process; although dualism and behaviorism are prominent arguments for the philosophy of the mind, both have their strengths and weaknesses.
The 'mind-body' problem has troubled philosophers for centuries. This is because no human being has been able to sufficiently explain how the mind actually works and how this mind relates to the body - most importantly to the brain. If this were not true then there would not be such heated debates on the subject. No one objects to the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun because it is empirical fact. However, there is no current explanation on the mind that can be accepted as fact. In 'What is it like to be a bat?', Thomas Nagel does not attempt to solve this 'problem'. Instead, he attempts to reject the reductionist views with his argument on subjectivity. He examines the difficulties of the mind-body problem by investigating the conscious experience of an organism, which is usually ignored by the reductionists. Unfortunately, his arguments contain some flaws but they do shed some light as to why the physicalist view may never be able to solve the mind-body problem.
While the great philosophical distinction between mind and body in western thought can be traced to the Greeks, it is to the influential work of René Descartes, French mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist, that we owe the first systematic account of the mind/body relationship. As the 19th century progressed, the problem of the relationship of mind to brain became ever more pressing.
What is the source of knowledge? What can we know? Questions like these dominated western philosophy during the 17th and 18th century. This philosophical period was known as the epistemological turn. The quest for the source of knowledge was not an easy one. This question had led to many disagreements about the nature of knowledge, and a philosophical war was waged which would last two centuries. It began with the 17th century with a french philosopher by the name of Rene Descartes. The answer to his epistemological quest was rationalism. For Descartes rationalism was the key to keeping our reality in check. Descartes had undergone a process of purging all that he thought he knew to find the sole source of knowledge . After much examination Descartes came to the realization that there were few things that could be considered pure knowledge. Since most of the things we know come from the senses, and the senses were falliable. He made a crucial discovery that would forever change the face of philosophy. The mind he regarded is the tool and the that could lead to a pure source of knowledge unbridled by the senses. He believed that we can only trust our minds that which we can intuit or “deduce” on our own. Descartes called these ideas of knowledge a priori. A priori are ideas that are innate, and that we can only arrive at through a special kind of reasoning known as deductive reasoning.Descartes famously declares the statement “cogito ergo sum “to answer the question of our existence. Because if the senses are decieving who is to say that this world we live in is a lie created by a wicked genius we call god.”Descartes believed that if he existed it was because his mind was engaged in the process of thinking. In other words only ...
But, “human persons have an ‘inner’ dimension that is just as important as the ‘outer’ embodiment” (Cortez, 71). The “inner” element cannot be wholly explained by the “outer” embodiment, but it does give rise to inimitable facets of the human life, such as human dignity and personal identity. The mind-body problem entails two theories, dualism and physicalism. Dualism contends that distinct mental and physical realms exist, and they both must be taken into account. Its counterpart (weak) physicalism views the human as being completely bodily and physical, encompassing no non-physical, or spiritual, substances.