Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Rene Descartes 1596-1650

Descartes’ Difficulty with Interaction:When Descartes defines “what I am” as a think which thinks,” hemakes no mention of the body, for everything is included inthinking: a thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills,refuses, imagines, and feels.” Presumably the self could feel heatwithout a body. But here Descartes cannot accept his own dualismfor he admits that “nature also teaches me by these sensations ofpain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not lodged in my body as a pilotin a vessel, but that I am very closely united to it, and, so to speak,so intermingled with it that I seem to compose it with it one whole.”By trying to locate the mind in the pineal gland, the technicalproblem of interaction remains, for if there is interaction, therewould have to be contact, and so mind would have to be extended.On this problem, his rules of method did not lead him to any clearand distinct conclusion.153