by Daniel Onyango

Created on: April 23, 2010

By examining some of his philosophical foundations and his seemingly controversial re-incarnation, this essay discusses the key features of Descartes’ departure from traditional scholastic philosophy.

Apart from his radical approach in defining substance, Descartes is thought to have held the belief in the dual distinction between the body and soul before coming up with the primitive notion of the union of body and the mind. In his dualist thesis Descartes held the view that there were two kinds of substance, namely minds or thinking substances, and bodies or corporeal substances (The Two-World’s View). To Descartes the mind’s essence was thought, and the predominant function of the body extension. Although Baker and Morris (1996) try to expand this dualism into four theses, involving the physical and mental, it is essentially a two-dimensional world summarised as the world of the physical, public observable objects, and the mental, private (states of consciousness) objects. According to Descartes, these two worlds interact causally within a human being, hence the dual relation between them . Dualism, therefore, is a two world idea: the physical world containing matter, and energy and all the tangible contents of the universe including human bodies, and a private psychical world which contains mental events and states inaccessible to the public observation .

However, compared to Descartes’ dualism, traditional scholastic philosophy believes that all things are composed of substance, and substance is a rational concept, not an imaginative one, that is, rationality and logic only should enable our understanding of their state of being without ambiguity. On the other hand, Descartes’dualism and the primitive notion of the union of mind and body as illustrated in the next few paragraphs, encompasses what Aristotelian principles refer to as secondary modes of being or accidents. Both dualism and the union of the body and mind try, rather incoherently, to explain the importance of these secondary modes in the states of being of the body, and the mind.

Not surprisingly, Descartes’ philosophy was not without controversy. Apart from a seemingly internal incoherence with his interactionist dualism, his letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia explaining his view of the relation between body and mind, also raises the question about his commitment to dualism.

In order to understand how Descartes departed from the traditional scholastic

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