Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Rene Descartes believed that only humans have souls. Thus, only humans are capable of thought: animals are entirely mechanical. When you think that your dog is thinking, then, you are actually just confused by the marvelous intricacy of the machinery. I used to think that this was a rather straight-forward idea. There would be times when I thought it idiotic and times when I thought it represented a fairly subtle sort of mistake: but in either mood I thought it easily enough grasped. It was, as Descartes himself said of ideas he approved, "clear and distinct." But recently I encountered an article by John Cottingham that persuades me that getting right what Descartes has to say about animals is a bit complicated. There are ambiguities here. I should confess here that the Cottingham article is no very new contribution to scholarship. It was published in 1978, and has evaded my attention until this week. Still ... here we are.  In Part V of RD's DISCOURSE he ex...

Here's a link to a philosophical defense of old-fashioned interactionist dualism , dated 2006 and submitted by a candidate for an M.A. in philosophy at Monash University. I'll come to Koksvik's argument in another post, but for now I'll review my understanding of the state of play. Interactionist dualism was famously Rene  Descartes ' answer to the question of the relationship between mind and body . There exist a lot of different possible answers to this question, from the materialist reductionism that says in essence that the 'mind' is an illusion, to the Berkeleyan idealism that says in essence that the 'body' is an illusion. Dualists all by definition say that mind and body are very different things or types of thing, and that they are both real. Dualists differ among themselves on whether the mind and body really interact. They certainly SEEM to interact! If I skip lunch, the thought "I'm hungry" will be in m...