Philosophy 1020 Lecture Notes - Microbiology, Folk Psychology, Occasionalism

• School: Western University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: Philosophy 1020
• Professor: Cathy Thorpe

Document Summary

Materialism: cartesian dualism, review of the position. There are two fundamentally different kinds of reality: body and mind (or: matter and mind, or: matter and soul ) Mind (or mental states) seem to be totally different: extended in space, resistant to touch, public, subject to physical forces, not extended in space, not tangible, private, not subject to physical forces, the chief problem facing dualism. Elizabeth: your notion of the soul excludes extension and it appears to me that an immaterial thing cant possibly touch anything else . It seems impossible to imagine how any physical thing can have causal interactions with the nonphysical mind . And yet body and mind interact all the time. Example: your mind telling you to raise your hand. According to princess elizabeth this should be completely impossible: three attempts to solve the problem: historical solutions. Descartes (whose work in metaphysics really gives rise to this whole enquiry)