Substance Dualism and Critiques

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the critiques of Cartesian substance dualism, including the causal interaction problem, the pairing problem, and alternative views like property dualism.

Substance Dualism

The claim that the mental and the physical are not the same substance.

Substance

A fundamental kind of thing which depends on nothing else for its existence, or at least nothing else finite.

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia

A contemporary of Descartes who challenged substance dualism by questioning how an immaterial mind could causally interact with a material body.

Telekinesis

The act of moving things with the mind, a concept the lecturer suggests Descartes' dualism resembles because it posits a mental will causing physical matter to move.

Primitive Notion

A basic concept, such as the union of mind and body, that Descartes argued is intelligible only in its own right and cannot be explained in any other way.

Causal Argument for Materialism

An argument that appeals to the experience of physical/mental interaction to suggest that the mind and body are not distinct substances.

Leibniz's Clock Analogy

An explanation for the appearance of mind-body interaction suggesting they are like two synchronized clocks that do not actually affect one another.

Bullet Biting View

A philosophical position that requires accepting something counterintuitive or implausible in order to maintain a different belief one wants to hold.

Jaegwon Kim

A philosopher who updated the causal argument against dualism and proposed the challenge known as the pairing problem.

The Pairing Problem

The difficulty of explaining how a specific mind is paired with a specific body without using spatial locations, which immaterial substances allegedly lack.

Intrinsically identical objects

Items with the same internal properties and causal potential, which are normally differentiated (individuated) in physical space by their spatial relationships.

Property Dualism

The view that there is only one substance (physical) but it possesses distinct categories of properties (physical and mental) that are not identical.

Substance Physicalism

The belief that there is only one substance in the world, and that substance is a physical substance.

Individuation of physical objects

The property where distinct objects exclude each other from spatial regions and cannot occupy the same point in space and time simultaneously.

Nonreductive Physicalism

A form of physicalism that is consistent with property dualism, holding that mental properties are distinct and not reducible to physical ones.