PHILOS 25B Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Billiard Ball, Scholasticism, Pineal Gland
Document Summary
Recap: in meditation vi, descartes proves bodies exist, however, we need to be careful of the judgments we make about bodies on the basis of our senses. A: descartes argues that they are not one substance. A: real distinction is a technical term descartes introduces in another work. To say that two things are really distinct only means that they can exist apart from each other: based on this, there is not fallacy. The body causes sensations in the mind, and the mind"s volitions cause movements in the body: how does this interaction occur, descartes thought it occurred in the pineal gland of the brain. The pineal gland is a part of the brain descartes thought. Only the animal spirits bear immediate causal relations to the mind. Everything else in the body only affects the mind indirectly: there is something accidental about the states of the pineal gland and the states of the mind.
