Descartes's Meditations V and VI

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Meditation V

• Having explained error, Descartes is now going to clean up and identify the kinds of things that he can be confidant there are
• The things I know are are the things I clearly and distinctly perceive.
• Example: geometric objects are certainly independently existing of me, since I can discover surprising things about them.
• Seeing clearly and distinctly requires some effort

Meditation VI
Here is the meat of the matter for the philosophy of mind

• Do material things exist independent of my mind? Yes: there are at least mathematical objects.
  • I often use imagination to think of matter (here imagination includes the idea of the faculty of having images, not just the ability to create fictions)
  • Images given in imagination are not clear and distinct: I can imagine a chiliagon, but I know that is not clear and distinct (the image is vague and like my image of a 999 sided figure)
  • I can understand a pentagon
• Understanding is the mind looking at mental contents.
• Imagination is the mind looking at images of sense.
• I also sense things.
  • I have a body
  • I sense my body's states
  • I sense external objects and their features
• But only that I am a thinking thing is essential to what I am. I have a distinct idea of my body, so it is not the same as me.
• I cannot understand myself without my mental faculties, but I can understand myself without my body
• My sensations are not under my control: they come from something independent of me (my body)
• The body is divisible, the mind is not
• My mind is not immediately affect by the body, but thoughts are immediate.
• We can intercede in a motion of the body, but not in a progress of thought

Important lessons

• Descartes's position is interactive substance dualism
  • Interactive: mind and body have causal interactions
  • Substance: for Descartes, a substance is a kind of being that can exist independent of other kinds of being. To say mind is a substance is to say you can have mind without, for example, matter.
  • Dualism: there are (at least?) two substances, namely mind and matter
• I believe that Descartes is making a falsifiable (and thus sufficiently scientific) hypothesis: that if we could see all the physical facts about a human body, this would not explain all of the actions of that body. Another way of saying this is that there will be physical events in bodies which do not have a physical cause.
• Later scholars will accuse Descartes of being incoherent. Ryle, for example, claims I could never know if you had a mind. But if we could see all my and your physical facts and I saw no inexplicable physical facts, then we would know Descartes was wrong. So: I am rejecting the Rylean claim that Descartes is incoherent by supposing Descartes claims are falsifiable.
• However, there may be post-Cartesian forms of dualism that are incoherent or which otherwise fall prey to profound epistemic concerns. (Epiphenomenalism?)