Cartesian Substance Dualism Lecture

Flashcards covering ancient and modern views of the soul, substance dualism, property dualism, and the philosophical arguments and problems associated with Cartesian dualism.

Epicurus

An ancient philosopher who held that the soul is a wholly material object composed of the same atoms and elements as everything else in the material world.

Substance Monism

The philosophical view that there is only one fundamental substance.

Property Monism

The philosophical view that everything has only one kind of property.

Aristotle

An ancient philosopher who defined the soul as the form of the living body, supporting a view of substance monism but property dualism.

Material Cause

In Aristotle's framework, this refers to the physical matter that composes an object, such as the bronze of a statue or the physical body of a human.

Formal Cause

In Aristotle's framework, this refers to the image or identity of an object, such as the specific form of a statue or the soul of a human.

Hylomorphism

The term used to describe Aristotle's view concerning the relationship between matter and form.

Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

A Middle Ages thinker who borrowed from Aristotle to argue that the body is a necessary condition of the soul.

St. Thomas Aquinas

An influential Christian thinker who utilized Aristotle's views to argue that physical resurrection is necessary for a person to survive death.

Plato

An ancient philosopher who viewed the soul as a simple, divine, immutable, and eternal substance that is completely independent from the body.

Substance Dualism

The theory that the body is one substance and the mind is another completely independent substance.

René Descartes

A 17th-century philosopher who argued in his Meditations that the mind is a distinct thinking substance that causally interacts with the body.

Principle of the Necessity of Identity

A logical principle proven by Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke stating that if $x = y$, then necessarily $x = y$ in all possible worlds.

Leibniz's Mill Argument

The argument that if the brain were a machine (like a mill), one would only find mechanical parts and nothing to explain the phenomenon of perception.

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia

A contemporary of Descartes who raised the problem of causal interaction, questioning how a non-physical thinking substance can move a physical body.

Causal Interaction Problem

The difficulty for substance dualists to explain how two distinct, independent substances (mind and body) can influence or depend on one another.

The Pairing Problem

A problem identified by Jaegwon Kim regarding how non-physical souls, which lack spatial location, are uniquely paired with specific physical brains.

Property Dualism

The view that there are two distinct types of properties (mental and physical) but that the mind is fundamentally dependent on a physical basis.