Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Who proposed dualism?
Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today. Dualism is contrasted with various kinds of monism. Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of emergent materialism or non-reductive physicalism in some sense.
Descartes, influenced by the automatons on display throughout the city of Paris, began to investigate the connection between the mind and body, and how the two interact. His main influences for dualism were theology and physics. The theory on the dualism of mind and body is Descartes' signature doctrine and permeates other theories he advanced. Known as Cartesian dualism (or Mind-Body Dualism), his theory on the separation between the mind and the body went on to influence subsequent Western philosophies. In "Meditations on First Philosophy", Descartes attempted to demonstrate the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul and the body. Humans are a union of mind and body; thus Descartes' dualism embraced the idea that mind and body are distinct but closely joined. While many contemporary readers of Descartes found the distinction between mind and body difficult to grasp, he thought it was entirely straightforward. Descartes employed the concept of "modes", which are the ways in which substances exist. In "Principles of Philosophy", Descartes explained, "we can clearly perceive a substance apart from the mode which we say differs from it, whereas we cannot, conversely, understand the mode apart from the substance". To perceive a mode apart from its substance requires an intellectual abstraction, which Descartes explained as follows:
Dualism in Indian philosophy refers to the belief held by certain schools of Indian philosophy that reality is fundamentally composed of two parts. This mainly takes the form of either mind-matter dualism in Buddhist philosophy or consciousness-matter dualism in the Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy. These can be contrasted with mind-body dualism in Western philosophy of mind, but also have similarities with it.
Moral dualism is the belief of the great complement of, or conflict between, the benevolent and the malevolent. It simply implies that there are two moral opposites at work, independent of any interpretation of what might be "moral" and independent of how these may be represented. Moral opposites might, for example, exist in a worldview which has one god, more than one god, or none. By contrast, duotheism, bitheism or ditheism implies (at least) two gods. While bitheism implies harmony, ditheism implies rivalry and opposition, such as between good and evil, or light and dark, or summer and winter. For example, a ditheistic system could be one in which one god is a creator, and the other a destroyer. In theology, dualism can also refer to the relationship between the deity and creation or the deity and the universe (see theistic dualism). This form of dualism is a belief shared in certain traditions of Christianity and Hinduism. Alternatively, in ontological dualism, the world is divided into two overarching categories. The opposition and combination of the universe's two basic principles of yin and yang is a large part of Chinese philosophy, and is an important feature of Taoism. It is also discussed in Confucianism.
Another form of dualism in Hindu philosophy is found in the Dvaita ("dualism") Vedanta school, which regards God and the world as two realities with distinct essences; this is a form of theistic dualism. By contrast, schools such as Advaita ("nondualism") Vedanta embrace absolute monism and regard dualism as an illusion ("maya").
In his seminal 20th century work "Physics and Philosophy", Warner Heisenberg reflects this kind of transactionalist thinking: "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The together-at-once reality of man as organism-environment is often overlooked in the dualistic thinking of even major philosophers like Descartes who is often referenced for his "I think, therefore I am" philosophy. Of a transactionalist approach, Heisenberg writes, "This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought, but it makes the sharp separation of the world and I impossible."
The position is credited to English biologist Thomas Huxley (Huxley 1874), who analogised mental properties to the whistle on a steam locomotive. The position found favour amongst scientific behaviourists over the next few decades, until behaviourism itself fell to the cognitive revolution in the 1960s. Recently, epiphenomenalism has gained popularity with those struggling to reconcile non-reductive physicalism and mental causation.
In the paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia" and later "What Mary Didn't Know" Frank Jackson made the so-called knowledge argument against physicalism. The thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson as follows:
The proposition is sometimes given as . This fuller form was penned by the eloquent French literary critic, Antoine Léonard Thomas, in an award-winning 1765 essay in praise of Descartes, where it appeared as In English, this is "Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist"; with rearrangement and compaction, "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am", or in Latin, "dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum".
Although most of the relevant tissues and endocrine glands had been identified by early anatomists, a more humoral approach to understanding biological function and disease was favoured by the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Lucretius, Celsus, and Galen, according to Freeman et al., and these theories held sway until the advent of germ theory, physiology, and organ basis of pathology in the 19th century.
Immanuel Kant (; ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is a central figure in modern philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued that space, time and causation are mere sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist, but their nature is unknowable. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience sharing certain structural features. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly objects can be intuited "a priori" ("beforehand"), and that intuition is therefore independent from objective reality. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. "The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures", a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: "Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy" and "The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God". In 1764, Kant wrote "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" and then was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his "Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality" (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer", remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics ("Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic") at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation ("Inaugural-Dissertation") "De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis" ("On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World)". This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The term was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, who conceived it as the "science of ideas". In contemporary philosophy it is narrower in scope than that original concept, or the ideas expressed in broad concepts such as "worldview", "imaginary" and "ontology".
René Descartes, with "je pense donc je suis" or "cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am", argued that "the self" is something that we can know exists with epistemological certainty. Descartes argued further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the certainty of the existence of God, using the ontological argument that had been formulated first by Anselm of Canterbury.
In the nineties of the last century he developed the "dialogical self theory", inspired by the American pragmatism of William James and the dialogical school of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin.
In Dutch politics the term dualism is used to refer to the separation of powers between the cabinet and parliament. In this respect, the way the Dutch cabinets function is somewhat semi-presidential in its system of government, not parliamentary. Unlike the presidential system, the legislative branch consists of the cabinet together with the parliament and cabinets are formed on basis of a majority in parliament. Unlike the Westminster parliamentary system, cabinet ministers cannot be members of parliament. An important political issue is whether ministers and leaders of governing parliamentary parties should prepare important political decisions. According to the dualistic position, members of parliament of governing parties should function independently of their cabinet. The term monism is used to refer to a stance that important decisions should be prepared by the members of the governing coalition in order to promote political stability.
The role of dialectic in Plato's thought is contested but there are two main interpretations: a type of reasoning and a method of intuition. Simon Blackburn adopts the first, saying that Plato's dialectic is "the process of eliciting the truth by means of questions aimed at opening out what is already implicitly known, or at exposing the contradictions and muddles of an opponent's position." A similar interpretation has been put forth by Louis Hartz, who suggests that elements of the dialectic are borrowed from Hegel. According to this view, opposing arguments improve upon each other, and prevailing opinion is shaped by the synthesis of many conflicting ideas over time. Each new idea exposes a flaw in the accepted model, and the epistemological substance of the debate continually approaches the truth. Hartz's is a teleological interpretation at the core, in which philosophers will ultimately exhaust the available body of knowledge and thus reach "the end of history." Karl Popper, on the other hand, claims that dialectic is the art of intuition for "visualising the divine originals, the Forms or Ideas, of unveiling the Great Mystery behind the common man's everyday world of appearances."
Many of the scholars in the Platonic Academy sought to clarify and explain Plato's ideas. Already in the 3rd century BC, we hear of a commentary to Plato's "Timaeus" being written by Crantor of Soli; and in the 1st century AD a commentary on Plato's "Republic" was written by Onasander. By the 2nd century the Middle Platonists were producing paraphrases and summaries of Plato's thought. Thus we have Albinus, who wrote an introduction to Plato's works, and Alcinous and Apuleius who both wrote manuals of Platonism. From the physician Galen we have fragments of a commentary on the "Timaeus". Already though the influence of Aristotle was being felt on the popular Platonism of the day, and we have the figure of Atticus (c. 175) who opposed the eclecticism which had invaded the school and contested the theories of Aristotle as an aberration from Plato.
The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by David Chalmers. The basic idea is that one can imagine, and, therefore, conceive the existence of, an apparently functioning human being/body without any conscious states being associated with it.
In one of Kant's major works, the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), he attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists which philosophy had led to, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. He frequently set his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the "Passions of the Soul", an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". His best known philosophical statement is "I think, therefore I am" (; ), found in "Discourse on the Method" (1637; written in French and Latin) and "Principles of Philosophy" (1644; written in Latin).
The doctrine of the univocity of being implies the denial of any real distinction between essence and existence. Aquinas had argued that in all finite being (i.e. all except God) the essence of a thing is distinct from its existence. Scotus rejected the distinction. Scotus argued that we cannot conceive of what it is to be something, without conceiving it as existing. We should not make any distinction between whether a thing exists ("si est") and what it is ("quid est"), for we never know whether something exists, unless we have some concept of what we know to exist.
In addition to already discussed theories of dualism (particularly the Christian and Cartesian models) there are new theories in the defense of dualism. Naturalistic dualism comes from Australian philosopher, David Chalmers (born 1966) who argues there is an explanatory gap between objective and subjective experience that cannot be bridged by reductionism because consciousness is, at least, logically autonomous of the physical properties upon which it supervenes. According to Chalmers, a naturalistic account of property dualism requires a new fundamental category of properties described by new laws of supervenience; the challenge being analogous to that of understanding electricity based on the mechanistic and Newtonian models of materialism prior to Maxwell's equations.
Descartes’ practical philosophy also proposed a dualism between the mind and the physical body, based on the belief that they are two distinct substances. The body is matter that is spatially extended, whereas the mind is the substance that thinks and contains the rational soul. Pope John Paul II responded to this dualism in his "Letter to Families" in 1994: “It is typical of rationalism to make a radical contrast in man between spirit and body, between body and spirit. But man is a person in the unity of his body and his spirit. The body can never be reduced to mere matter”. Pope John Paul II maintained that the stark Cartesian opposition between body and spirit leads to human sexuality as an area for manipulation and exploitation, rather than wonder and unity as he addresses in the Theology of the Body lectures.
The dualism between God and Creation has existed as a central belief in multiple historical sects and traditions of Christianity, including Marcionism, Catharism, Paulicianism, and Gnostic Christianity. Christian dualism refers to the belief that God and creation are distinct, but interrelated through an indivisible bond. In sects like the Cathars and the Paulicians, this is a dualism between the material world, created by an evil god, and a moral god. Historians divide Christian dualism into absolute dualism, which held that the good and evil gods were equally powerful, and mitigated dualism, which held that material evil was subordinate to the spiritual good. The belief, by Christian theologians who adhere to a libertarian or compatibilist view of free will, that free will separates humankind from God has also been characterized as a form of dualism. The theologian Leroy Stephens Rouner compares the dualism of Christianity with the dualism that exists in Zoroastrianism and the Samkhya tradition of Hinduism. The theological use of the word dualism dates back to 1700, in a book that describes the dualism between good and evil.
Technological dualism was proposed by Benjamin Higgins. He was the Ritchie Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne in the late 1940s. His theory explains the causes of unemployment in the underdeveloped economies. Developing countries of today are often characterized by dualistic economies. One is the modern (or formal) sector while the other is the traditional (informal) sector. Their relation has been explained by Higgins in his theory explained below.