PHL 301 1st Edition Lecture 9Outline of Last Lecture II.Plato’s virtue as rational controlIII.Augustine’s “millions of parts in a soul”a.Conflicting desiresb.Conflicting emotionsc.Conflicting reasonsIV.Contra AcademiaV.MetaphysicsOutline of Current LectureVI.Evil DeceiverVII.Method of DoubtVIII.Mind-Body Interactiona.Objections by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemiab.Rebuttle by DescartesIX.Atomic Theory of MatterCurrent LectureRené Descartes (1596-1650) wondered if there was anything he could be sure of. He saidthat sometimes his dreams felt extremely real, but then he woke up and realized they were just dreams. Occasionally he even had a dream within a dream, in which he woke up from in the firstlevel of the dream and thought he was awake, but then he woke up again. This caused him to doubt everything, including logic and math. He came up with the idea of an evil deceiver, an all-powerful being sort of like God, but evil, who might be altering his mind. As you will remember from a previous lecture, Philo of Alexandria said that every person’s mind was “stamped” with the same word of God that the world was stamped with, meaning that both had the same sort of blueprint, essentially. Descartes wonders whether an evil being might have stamped his mind with a completely different blueprint, creating, unbeknownst to him, a completely wrong perception of reality. Descartes exercises his method of doubt and wonders if there is anything he cannot doubt, which would serve as a foundation for the rest of his knowledge. He realizes there are two things: “I think,” and “I am,” or “Cogito, ergo sum.” These must be true because even if he doubts whether or not he is thinking, that is still a form of thinking. Therefore, he must be able to think. In a similar way, he must exist. These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute.Following these, he decides “I am a thing that thinks” and “I know my own mind more securely than anything else.This leads to the idea of mind-body interaction. Mental causation is when the mind is controlling the body, such as telling it to raise its hand. Sensation is when the body is controllingthe mind, such as when it feels pain. Descartes writes that the mind and body are distinct from one another, and he calls this Dualism.While he is writing these conjectures, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia writes him with several objections. She questions how mental causation works because there are physical causes for the body to move as well as mental acts. Additionally, mental acts are not extended in space, and they only directly apply to the body. Descartes’s response to this is not a very useful one: We perceive the interaction of mind and body, and we can trust our sense pretty well, most of the time. He says that we have certain basic innate ideas about the world. However, this contradicts Philo of Alexandria’s view that we cannot know which properties the world has and which we contribute.The Atomic Theory of Matter is relevant here. It states that things are not as they appearbecause the primary qualities of objects include size, mass, how many atoms they are made up of, etc. We assign secondary qualities to objects, such as texture, color, and aesthetics, all of which appear readily to us but are not actually real. There is then a discrepancy between the world as it really is, primarily, and how we perceive
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