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Hello, everyone. So, Professor Sakata mentioned in his talk that soul for Descartes means mind.

And so what I want to talk about today is why that is the case.

And the way that that came about was that Descartes argued against the scholastics that

soul doesn't do anything biologically.

So the preceding scholastic conception was that we need soul in order to account for the biological

life of an organism.

And that position in philosophy is called vitalism.

So Descartes rejected that.

He rejected the thesis of vitalism. And

this paper is about whether that argument of his is successful or not. Okay. So this is, this outline

is a summary of an article that I've already published. So if you flip over onto the second page,

the last bullet point, the

final two lines, you'll see the actual title of the article that's published. So if you want

to actually read the article, you just need to Google the title and it will pull it up. It's

actually on my website, my Boston College faculty website. You can just download it for free

from there.

So first I'll read the abstract and then I'll just talk through the outline in a leisurely way.

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