Rene Descartes Dualism Essay

Rene Descartes’ philosophies on dualism is one that still to this day philosophers ponder about, and have not fully answered all of the questions that have stemmed from the famous theory. The major thought behind his philosophy was that after God there are two natures known as extension and thought. According to the text “On one hand is material substance, whose sential attribute is extension (occupancy of space), and on the other hand is mind whose essential attribute is thought.” (Moore, Bruder, 99) Essentially what Descartes was saying was that while the mind and the body are both two separate entities, they work as one from time to time. However, this brings me back to my first point in which, philosophers still ponder today. Questions such as, if the body is bound to the laws of the

One being occasionalism which is the assentation that in the event that you are telling your body to do something, it is not your brain that tells your body to move but rather it is God that wishes your body to make that exact movement at that time. For example, you think to yourself to skip instead of walk, it is not your thoughts that bring this action to motion, but rather God who decides that it is time for you to skip. The other theory philosophers came up with to explain Cartesian dualism, was parallelism. In parallelism, it is thought that it is not really your brain sending signals to your body to move, once you have the thought to move your body, it is just happenstance that your body moves at that exact time in that same exact way that you wished it to. For example, if you will you body to flinch, you may think that it is your mind willing your body to do so, but it may just be the affect of some external stimuli in the physical world to do so. In my example, the external stimuli would be an entity that exists in the physical world, thus sticking closely to Descartes’ dualism