Dualism

The Mind-Body Problem, and Human Understanding Rene Descartes (1998) believed that the mind and body were two separate things, which could exist without each other, a type of dualism known as interactionism (Kardas, 2014, pg. 174). His theory, however, came to be known as the mind-body problem, due to the lack of any clear, concrete understanding of his ideas (Kardas, 2014, pg. 174). In contrast, John Locke’s (1998) theories showed that the mind used the body to obtain sensory information,…

Edin Palmar PHI2010 F 10:00-10:50am Dr. Schuh Ch.1 Introduction 1. Explain some of the benefits a student may gain by studying philosophy. Studying philosophy helps one tackle the question of the “self” in the sense that it makes one really think of why they believe in something or why one does the things they do. This in turn will help us to “think, reason, and evaluate” critically in order to attain wisdom and intelligence, something not easily obtained due to the constant bombardment of the…

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a gothic novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886, is a glimpse back in time to the Victorian era. The novella highlights the Victorian morality and the Victorian model of life. The key features of Victorian morality include a set of moral values pillared in sexual restraints, low tolerance policies on crimes and a strict social code of conduct. Dr. Jekyll is a respected member living in the Victorian society, who abides to all the…

Lewis discusses two views of our world, dualism and Christianity. Dualism believes there is a fight between good and evil with two distinct powers at battle. These two independent powers existed at the beginning of time and one is not above the other. However, to say one power is good and one power is bad, one would need a basis to identify these traits. Christianity views are different from dualism in relation to the belief of how evil came into play. Christian views…

people are in fact “a people with history”, especially since the Europeans took over and forced them to change. Another problem with the way they spoke about the natives’ is that they were using “stereotypical dualism” that is discussed in Staurt Hall’s “The West and the Rest”. Stereotypical dualism is when a stereotype has a good and bad aspect to it, and most of the time the good just outweighs the bad. They would say that the locals’ way of living in nature is a primitive way of life and that…

In our world today, we are taught many things that develop from the standpoint of religion. Elizabeth Johnson, a Roman Catholic feminist theologian wrote many well-known books that discuss an over view of topics that arise in theology and religion. Johnson wrote Quest for the Living God in 2007, she discusses in chapter 5; God Acting Womanish which goes into depth about female language in relation with God. Today, many people describe their faith and religion with certain language portraying the…

The notion of “mental space” that Kim discusses is indeed puzzling, and the plausibility of its existence questionable. It is difficult to imagine what “location” could refer to in this space. Perhaps locations would be particular qualitative states and, on this view, perhaps minds could be distinguished from one another by appeal to the state that they possess at a given time. However, if “mental space” includes a fundamentally temporal component, as Kim believes it would have to, it follows…

The mind is thinking but is in no way physical, whereas the body is the opposite. A name for the argument against the identity theory is eliminative materialism also known as Dualism. This states that there is no such thing as mental states or thoughts, the exact opposite of physicalism. Rene Descartes is the most famous supporter of this ideology. Descartes states in his Sixth Meditation, his mind is a thinking, non-extended…

America: The Home of the Confined and the Brave? America. The home of the free and the brave. Are we truly free though? When people think about being free, they think “free” in the sense of being free from laws, restriction, or rules that are holding them back from doing whatever they want. If this is the case, then America is far from free. If America is not as free as it claims to be, then what does it mean to be free? Well for me, it depends on what the sense of freedom is. There is a…

Cartesian dualism (8). The authors highlight that bodies, aside from being biological entities, carry social meaning and can exhibit suffering and social marginalization, thus representing the mind-body interactions with the three bodies as what maintains health and illness, the very information needed for health practitioners to understand an individual’s suffering as equal to the biology behind the pain. Nevertheless, missing in this article is a coherent model that may reject Cartesian…