PHIL 0460 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: The Need, Monism, Mental Substance
Document Summary
I am sound in body and mind . The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak . The human as a mind/body compound is one of the earliest philosophical notions in the. Aristotle: every living organism is a compound of soul and body. Descartes: human beings are compounds of a mind (mens) and a body (corpus) Aristotle: soul and body are with few exceptions essentially interdependent. Descartes: mind and body are essentially independent. We are our minds, and as such we are thinking things. We are also joined to a body, which accomplishes a number of the operations (growing, digesting, etc. ) we perform as living human beings. Our minds and bodies causally interact in various ways: the body sometimes causally influences the mind e. g. in perception, the mind sometimes causally influences the body, e. g. in willing it to move. Dualism: dualism about x is the thesis that there are two fundamentally different types of x.
