Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London

and the LM, online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, Ghost in the Machine,

Cartesian dualism. If you ask a modern-day philosopher to explain Cartesian dualism,

they'll tell you it is a theory about

the mind. The Cartesian, impressed by the uniqueness of consciousness, postulates a mind,

self, or soul that is a substance in its own right, and might be able to survive bodily death.

But if you use your thinking self to consider it for about five seconds, you'll see that

this cannot have been the radical new claim made by Descartes, for the simple reason that people

had been saying it for about 2,000 years before he came along. Obviously, Plato, and all those

who thought of themselves as Platonists, were dualists in this sense, but even Aristotle argues that the mind

needs no bodily organ. This had inspired Aristotelians from late antiquity to the Renaissance to argue that

he too made the rational part of the soul independent from the body. The standard scholastic view,

which Descartes would have learned well as a student, was that

the soul is the substantial form of the body, responsible for all the body's vital powers,

from digestion and sensation to imagination and memory, but also giving humans a capacity for

abstract thought, which is carried out immaterially.

Insofar as the scholastics perceived any serious threat to this

orthodoxy, it came from a non-dualist direction. Some schoolmen down in Padua had been flirting with

the idea that the soul is so closely tied to the body that it cannot survive on its own. So Descartes' innovation

cannot have been that he postulated a separate rational soul.

Rather, his decisive intervention was on the side of the body, or matter.

His bold new physics would explain a wide range of phenomena mechanistically.

...