The Mind and the Body

Danette D. Woodson-Davis

Dr. R.G. Moses

Phil 1301: Introduction to Philosophy

10-15-07

The Mind and The Body

I. Mind over Matter (Physical Matter, that is!) My mind is telling me that this paper is making me very tired and my body is saying lets stop and get some sleep. Is it that my mind is tired of reading and comprehending all the text material, I have read over the last few days? This is the theory of the mind and body problem that has plague man since the days of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great philosophers of ancient times and even present day. Feelings are beliefs about the value of different things and hopes and desires require the existence of beliefs in we perceive in our minds. Our bodies are physical that we can touch and see with our eyes. This is the theory of Renee Descartes," I think therefore I am". (Descartes, 92) Two side of the same story: mind and body.

II. Renee Descartes believes in" I think therefore I am" (Descartes, 92) or more so dualism view of nature. His view insists on the existence of two independent, separable irreducible, unique realms. In the beginning, he believed it possible to use our clear and distinct ideas to demonstrate the existence of god, generally rely upon our reason despite the possibility of error, to deduce the essence of body, and to prove that material things do exist. On these grounds, Descartes defended a strict dualism, according to which the mind and body are wholly distinct, even though it seems evident that they interact. He would say, "If we can conceive one thing without the other, then those two things are different." (Velasquez, 77)

III. Descartes would consider the two realms as the mind and the body. Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, whereas physical events obviously do not. This "thing" was the essence of himself that, which doubts, believes, hopes, and thinks. The distinction between mind and body is argued in Meditation VI as follows:

I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking, non-extended thing, and a clear and distinct idea of body as an extended and non-thinking thing. Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can so create. Therefore, Descartes argues, the mind, a thinking thing, can exist apart from its extended body. Therefore, the mind is a substance distinct from the body, a substance whose essence is thought.[4]

IV. Gottfried Leibniz (1614-1716) would not have to agree that the body is interacting but instead running "parallel order like two synchronized clocks"(Velasquez, 78). Furthermore, any of your mental attributes can be affected by the state of your body. A chemical imbalance in your brain can make you unhappy. Hunger or fatigue can make you irritable or draw your mind off of deep philosophical problems. Exercising your body can make your mind more active and better able to think. This is just a part of Leibniz theory that the mind and body runs separately but independently of each other. Leibniz's alternative resolution of the problem of the relation of body and soul: the soul does truly represent its body and the world, for God has made souls and bodies in that way. Therefore, each body has a soul joined to it that perceives the world the body is in, and it makes it adequately. (if it is not disturbed by emotions). Thus, he writes about in book Philosophical Works how "the way of influence is that of common philosophy" and the following is about his hypotheses about the God

"..the way of harmony pre-established by a prevenient divine contrivance, which from the beginning has formed each of these substances in a way so perfect and regulated with so much accuracy that merely by following laws of its own, received with its being, it nevertheless agrees with the other, just as if there were mutual influence, or as if God in addition to his general cooperation constantly put his hand thereto."

He shows his contempt for Descartes in his own writing about the correlations between the mind and the body. Here is a passage from Article 8 from Leibniz book "Philosophical Works" on the presumption of Descartes on corporeal things:

This is not valid: "I am able to assume or imagine that not corporeal things exist but I am not able to imagine that I do not exist or that I do not think; therefore I am not corporeal, nor is thought a mode of body." And I marvel that such an able man could attribute so much to so light a sophism; certainly he adds nothing more in this article. What he brings forward in his Meditation will be examined in its proper place (