Mind–Body Dualism

Abstract

‘Suffering’, ‘remembering’, ‘weighing 55 kilos’, ‘being in the doorway’ are among the properties that are routinely assigned to individual people. While mental processes, such as remembering and mental states, such as being in pain, are ascribed only to people and beings similar to them, weight and location are attributes of many kinds of things that are certainly not people. Should this distinction in kinds of attributes shape our efforts to study people by considering each person to be a composite of two distinct substances – a mind and a body? Rene Descartes' famous argument for substance dualism subsequently appeared in various versions but it has been the focus of searching criticisms. Several alternative proposals for organizing the study of the attributes of persons into a coherent body of knowledge have been proposed. These include materialism or physicalism, that there is only one relevant substance, material stuff; and various versions of personalism, that ‘person’ is the primitive core of all descriptions of human life, conceptually prior to both ‘mind’ and ‘body’. Wittgenstein's strategy in the face of the rerunning of the mind–body debates over centuries was to suggest that both sides of the dichotomy that has shaped these debates should abandoned and new distinctions introduced.