Descartes, Other Minds and Impossible Human Bodies

Manning, Gideon

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Descartes, Other Minds and Impossible Human Bodies

Gideon Manning

November 2012, Volume 12, No. 16, pp. 1-24

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0012.016

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Abstract

I have three aims in this paper. First, I show that in order to motivate skepticism about other minds it is necessary to have both the right conception of the human body – alive and fully functioning without a connection to the mind – and the right conception of the mind – knowable directly in our own case and without the need for inference. Second, while the seventeenth-century Cartesian Gerauld de Cordemoy had the right conception of the human body and the right conception of the mind, and likely wrote the first self-standing monograph dedicated to skepticism about other minds, I show that René Descartes lacked the right conception of the human body. Instead, Descartes always maintained that the living functioning human body exists with a mind. Finally, I show that when responding to skepticism about other minds at the prompting of Henry More, Descartes did not appeal to competent language use but to natural facts about the origin of the human body. This serves to reiterate that for Descartes where there are living human bodies there are always minds. These results challenge us to reexamine the human body’s place in Descartes’ physics of extended matter. I explore this last point in my concluding remarks.

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What is definitive, however, is that when it comes to finding mere human bodies, Descartes’ position is not so different from the scholastic Aristotelian’s position. Both Descartes and the Aristotelians take the human body to implicate the existence of the human soul. But why, then, are we so often told, especially by Descartes himself, that it was one of Descartes’ goals in physics to replace the scholastic view of bodies as matter-form composites with a view of bodies as mere extension? How does this goal fit with his views about the human body? And specifically, if the human body is not a body like all the others, what kind of body is it? What is the relation between the living human body, the embryo’s body and the human corpse? Does the physicist get to study the human body, or is it reserved for the metaphysician or, possibly, the physician? These questions gain added historical significance given that Cordemoy, one of Descartes’ earliest and most innovative readers, failed entirely to notice that they might be worth asking. For Cordemoy and the majority of first-generation Cartesians, the human body was a mere human body. It was markedly distinct from the human body analyzed as a matter-form composite in the Aristotelian scholastic style. These early Cartesians understood Descartes as maintaining the same position. However, we now know that Descartes was not on their side. Recognizing as much, we can add to our list of questions: When did Descartes’ actual view fade into the background? I hope this paper will encourage others to consider this and the previous questions as I too have now begun to do.

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