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dualism

Source:
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
Author(s):

Keith E. Yandell

dualism 

While there are many dualisms in the history of philosophy, ‘dualism’ typically refers to a thesis about body and mind. Dualism in contemporary guise often focuses on properties, in particular on the question whether mental properties are identical with physical properties. Traditional dualism, however, concerns questions about substances. This article focuses on the traditional substance version of mind–body theory.

The traditional dualist views both body and mind as substances – as things that have properties, are not merely a collection of properties, have essential properties and can endure over time. Minds are conceived as conscious and self-conscious things located in time but not space (although see below). Bodies are conceived as things composed of matter and located in both space and time. Being a mind defines one kind of thing and being a body defines another kind of thing, and no one thing can be of both kinds.

René Descartes is the most famous mind–body substance dualist, and much discussion in Britain as elsewhere can be seen in response to his work. Descartes developed a purely mechanistic physics determining the properties and relations of physical objects, leaving out all causal connections, in either direction, between minds and bodies. This made it tempting to think of the physical story as giving the entire causal story, and thus made a mystery of the apparent causal efficacy of the mind in the physical world. Providing a generally accepted account of mind–body interaction proved to be an enduring challenge for dualists.

The French philosopher and dualist Nicolas Malebranche attempted to solve Descartes's problem by claiming, on the ground that all causal power belongs to God, that God acts directly on both mind and body to make mental states and physical states correspond to one another without minds and bodies ever actually causally affecting one another (see occasionalism). Malebranche was influential in Britain, with John Norris, Thomas Taylor and Richard Sault as followers. However, the typical and dominant dualist view in Britain has been interactionism, which claims that mental states directly cause physical states and physical states directly cause mental states. The mind is embodied, for interactionists, in the sense that there is an intimate, complex and mutual casual connection between it and a body, whose physical location provides the perspective from which the world is sensed, through which it interacts with other material objects, and whose physical condition affects the well-being of the mind. A supposed Causal Likeness Principle – that the cause must resemble the effect – is widely regarded to be false, and everyday experience confirms the causal impact, for example, of choices on bodily movement in action and of physical injury giving rise to painful mental states. Epiphenomenalism, an aberrant version of dualism, holds alternatively that mental states are effects but not causes.

A consequence of mind–body dualism is that, since the mind and the body are distinct, the death of the body does not automatically entail the cessation of the mind. Whereas Greek dualists held that the mind is naturally immortal, and depends for its existence on nothing distinct from itself, British dualists, influenced by Judeo-Christian teachings, have held that the mind is naturally immortal in no stronger sense than that it depends only on God for its existence. It is worth noting that despite its historical background, there is nothing inherent in dualism that downgrades the importance of being embodied or degrades the states that a mind is in by virtue of being embodied.

Historically, the major opposing position to dualism in the philosophy of mind has been materialism, which holds that what talk of minds is really all about is certain capacities and activities which sufficiently complex material things have and engage in. Mind–body dualism is, however, inconsistent with any metaphysical monism. Thus, dualists oppose not only materialism but also idealism, which holds that what talk of bodies is really all about is the sensory contents of conscious experiences.

Bishop George Berkeley was an idealist. He held that, properly speaking, minds – conscious things – alone exist, all else being simply a manner of the existence of minds. To be is to be a mind or to be perceived or thought by a mind. Thomas Hobbes was a materialist. His view was that mental activity of any sort is simply physical motion in the head and the nervous and circulatory system; he held that even God is corporeal. Mind–body dualism agrees with idealism that there are minds, but denies that there are only minds. It agrees with materialism that there are bodies, but denies that there are only bodies. Though he thought that an omnipotent Deity might give the power of thought to a purely material being, and hence (in contrast to the view of most traditional dualists) that matter might think, John Locke, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, embraced mind–body dualism.

Among the most famous and influential of mind–body dualists one finds Samuel Clarke, Ralph Cudworth and Bishop Joseph Butler. Clarke's correspondence with Mr Dodwell, Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the World and Butler's Of Personal Identity defend the immateriality of the mind or soul, its simplicity or indivisibility, and the inability of anything purely material to engage in cognitive activity. Cudworth held that extension pervades space and must be the extension of something. Where there is a physical object, what is extended is that object. Locke and Henry More also held this position, or one much like it. If God as a spirit can be extended in some sense, then there seems no reason in principle why a mind or soul cannot be extended in that same sense. The sort of extension that bodies have is divisible and resists penetration. Not so the extension that characterizes God. Where there is no physical object, what is extended is God.

Thomas Reid denied that persons are simply reducible to material entities subject to the laws of nature, holding that they are by contrast free and responsible agents, initiators of their own actions. He held that our only contact with genuine causality comes from our awareness of our own choices. The existence of an immaterial mind or soul comports well with theism, which claims that there is an immaterial God, and which accepts the contingent immortality of a soul whose fate is distinct from that of the body.

Non-dualists have offered many objections to dualism. These include the objections that minds and bodies, or mental states and physical states, are too unlike to be causally related (a use of the causal resemblance theory that is unusual in philosophy after, say, Hume), that what is in space cannot affect or be affected by what is not (to which the dualist replies that only experience teaches us what does, and hence can, cause what else), that the principle of the conservation of energy would be violated if mind–body causation occurred (which raises questions concerning whether physical nature is closed and whether quantum considerations are relevant), and more generally that science supports physicalism (a claim that dualists deny).

The dominant perspective in metaphysics during the last century has been materialist (specifically physicalist), which has been reflected in the philosophy of mind. While various versions of physicalism have come and gone, and more than one current physicalist contender wars with others, the idea has arisen that physicalism is the proper research programme. Only versions of physicalism tend to be taken seriously in the philosophy of mind (hence the increase of property dualism), and an anti-dualist perspective is pervasive even if no version of physicalism currently available escapes powerful criticisms.

Bibliography

Clarke, Samuel, Collected Works (New York, 1978).Find this resource:

Cudworth, Ralph, True Intellectual System of the World (1678).Find this resource:

Delgarno, M. and E. Matthews (eds), The Philosophy of Thomas Reid (Dordrecht, 1989).Find this resource:

Gladstone, W. E. (ed.), Collected Works of Joseph Butler (Oxford, 1896).Find this resource:

Lehrer, Keith, Thomas Reid (London and New York, 1989).Find this resource:

Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690; ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1975).Find this resource:

Norris, John, An Essay towards the Theory of the Intelligible World (1701–4; repr. New York, 1978).Find this resource:

Reid, Thomas, Inquiry and Essays (Indianapolis, 1969).Find this resource:

Keith E. Yandell

See also Afterlife; Ancient Philosophy; Consciousness; Natural Law