The Mind-Body Problem: A Non-Materistic Identity Thesis (original) (raw)

At least two quite distinct problems appear to have been confused under the label "mind-body problem." The first is posed by the alleged fact of mind-body interaction, while the second arises from the purported fact of mind-body parallelism. And the issues are as different as are the senses of "mind" and "body" which they involve. Interaction. Historically, the mind-body puzzle is part of our Cartesian legacy. It seems not to have arisen in the form we know it during the previous history of Western thought. It is probably because the Greeks had no prevailing conception of a de-spiritualized material world. Although the origins of this conception can be traced at least to Democritus, the view was not "enculturated" until the rise of the "new physics." In the prevailing Aristotelian view, the material world was not exclusively material, since it was animated by final causes. But when this world came to be viewed as nothing but matter in motion, reflective persons were faced with an apparent difficulty. For if, as morality, theology, and common sense all seemed to agree, a person is not merely a physiological machine in the material world of natural science, that is, if a man has a mind as well as a body, and if, through volition, this mind sometimes acts on his body (and vice versa), the question then arises: how is such interaction possible? As Descartes formulated it, the mind-body problem became, above all, the problem of interaction.