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What are Descartes' arguments for his distinction between mind and body? What problems, if any does this distinction raise?
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- Mon Dec 22 2003

... What are Descartes' arguments for his distinction between mind and body? What problems, if any does this distinction raise? Harrison and Barbet define Dualism as "the view that the world, including man, is constituted out of two different kinds of 'stuff' or substances, for example, mind and matter." While the great philosophical distinction between mind and body in western thought can be traced back to Ancient Greece, it is to the seminal work of René Descartes (1596-1650), mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist, that we owe the first systematic account of the mind/body relationship. Descartes, born in Touraine, the small town of La Haye, was educated from the age of eight at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. It was here that Descartes fashioned the tendency of spending the morning in bed, engaged in systematic meditation that was key in his later writings. The metaphysical split between mind and body did not appear














