Cartesian Dualism Quotes

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

The body does not create the mind; the Mind creates the body.

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.

Andy Clark has several books you can find on Amazon, including 'Natural Born Cyborgs' and 'Being There.' I particularly recommend 'Being There' to anybody who still thinks the Cartesian separation of mind and body should be taken seriously.

We can study various psychic functions and also the more primitive sensory functions, such as seeing, hearing, and so on, which constitute our image of our everyday world. They have a material side and the psychic side. And that is a gap which you cannot explain.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.

...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

While the faculty of sensation is dependent upon the body, mind is separable from it

The system of Descartes... seemed to give a plausible reason for all those phenomena; and this reason seemed more just, as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities. But in philosophy, a student ought to doubt of the things he fancies he understands too easily, as much as of those he does not understand.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

The body cannot be the soul.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

...it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.

I am thinking, therefore I exist. (...) I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is solely to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this 'I' - that is, the soul by which I am what I am - is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things.