PHIL1070 Lecture Notes - Baruch Spinoza, Monism, Occasionalism
30 Apr 2014
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Document Summary
The mind-body problem: the following three claims are mutually incompatible: naturalism: all physical events have only physical causes. Accepting di (dualistic interactionism) requires us to make a choice: keep dualism, but get rid of interaction. (malebranche) Keep interaction, but get rid of dualism. (physicalism: the soul/mind is just the brain. ) Get rid of both dualism and interactionism. (leibniz) Malbranche occasionalism: there are immaterial souls and material bodies (dualism, but, there is no causal interaction between mind & body, there seems to be interaction, because god intervenes to coordinate mental and physical events. Cartesian dualism sets the agenda for early modern debates about the nature of mind. Two ways of perceiving the essence of god/nature. Two ways of looking at reality as a whole. These two correspond; facts are about things. The order and relation of ideas is the same as the order and relation of things. The mind is the idea of the body.
