- seCtIon one: tHe PRoBLem
they work by magic or they must be using some kind of energy
or matter. In this case, they are also physical stuff and not purely
mental.
Do you see this egg? With this you can overthrow
all the schools of theology, all the temples of the
earth. What is this egg? [. . .] First there’s a dot
that quivers, a thread that stretches and takes on
colour, tissue that is formed; a beak, tips of wings,
eyes, feet that appear; a yellowish matter that
uncoils and produces intestines; it is an animal.
This animal moves, writhes, cries out; I hear its
cries through the shell; it clads itself with down; it
sees [. . .] it has all your ailments; all your actions,
it performs them. Will you claim, with Descartes,
that it is a pure imitative machine? But little
children will laugh at you, and philosophers will
reply that if this is a machine then you are too. If
you admit that between the animal and yourself
there is no difference but in organisation, you will
be showing good sense and reason, you will be
honest; but from this people will conclude against
you that from inert matter, arranged in a certain
way, impregnated with other inert matter, with
heat and motion, there results the capacity for
sensation, life, memory, consciousness, passion,
thought.(Denis Diderot, Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot [En-
tretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot], 1769, our translation)Substance dualism does not work. Almost all contemporary
scientists and philosophers agree on this. In 1949 the British
philosopher Gilbert Ryle derided dualism as ‘the dogma of
the Ghost in the Machine’ (p. 26), a phrase that has entered
into common parlance. He said we should avoid phrases
like ‘in the head’ and ‘in the mind’ because they make us
think of minds as ‘queer “places”, the occupants of which are
special-status phantasms’ (1949, p. 40). Ryle was influenced by Wittgenstein’s
‘ordinary-language philosophy’, which proposed that many philosophical
problems are caused by misuses of language. Ryle argued that because we
don’t know how to talk about mind, we often talk about it using the language
of material cause and effect, but in the negative: we say, ‘Minds are not bits
of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork’ (p. 9). If we do this, we are
making a category mistake: we are putting mind into the wrong category ofPRoFILe 1.1
René Descartes (1596–1650)
Descartes was born near Tours in
France, was educated at a Jesuit
college, and was a staunch believer
in an omnipotent and benevolent
God. On 11 November 1619, he
had a series of dreams which in-spired him with the idea of a completely new philosophical
and scientific system based on mechanical principles. He
was not only a great philosopher, now often called ‘the
father of modern philosophy’, but also a physicist, a phys-
iologist, and a mathematician. He was the first to draw
graphs and invented Cartesian coordinates, which remain
a central concept in mathematics. He is best known for his
saying ‘I think, therefore I am’ (je pense, donc je suis, or
cogito ergo sum), which he arrived at using his ‘method of
doubt’. He tried to reject everything that could be doubt-
ed and accept only that which was beyond doubt, which
brought him to the fact that he, himself, was doubting. He
described the human body entirely as a machine made of
‘extended substance’ (in the Latin, res extensa), but con-
cluded that the mind, spirit, or soul (which he called the
animus) must be a separate entity made of a non-spatial
and indivisible ‘thinking substance’ (res cogitans). The two
substances were connected through the pineal gland. This
theory became known as Cartesian dualism, a term which
is now used synonymously with substance dualism – that
is, any theory that posits causal interactions between fun-
damentally distinct substances, material and immaterial.
For the last twenty years of his life, Descartes lived mostly
in Holland. He died of pneumonia in Sweden in 1650.