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Cartesian Dualism Essay

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Cartesian Dualism With the “new” Method of Doubt, Descartes arrived at the conclusion, that he can doubt everything except the existence of his own mind. And it is important to understand that he can doubt his physical body but not his mind, therefore he argues that there is a significant difference between Mind and Body. Modern science has shown how the brain is, simplified stated, a machine which causes thinking. For Descartes this was not his understanding of the brain. He rather thought that the brain can be understood as the connecting organ between the physical body and the immaterial mind. For Descartes, this mind and what he titled as thinking can be more described as experiencing to the modern reader. The reason for this is that …show more content…

It might be enough to write several books about. I was surprised by the problems I had to find easily accessible overviews of the influence of Descartes on the modern World. The reason, I came to assume, is that one can not just simply state the areas in which Rene Descartes was influential, since our whole Modern World is influenced by his thinking. Mathematics, Physics, Religion, Philosophy, actually the whole sector of Science and even the averages man's Worldview. And even if we have thinkers who are not as much Cartesian, like Nietzsche or Marx, we still have to assume that some of their basic starting points came out of a scientific Worldview created by the Method of Doubt of Descartes. The same goes for the area of Mathematics in which we still use some Cartesian Principles. Even so many of the Theologians in Descartes time disagreed with Descartes proud announcement to having conquered Scepticism, the question of how to tell true knowledge has played a part in the change of scientific method toward a more math based empiricist method which we still hold to in the postmodern

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