Descartes's substance dualism and his independence conception of substance

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 69-90

  Rodriguez Pereyra, Gonzalo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949702878     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2008.1827     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. For the first claim, see Louis Loeb, From Descartes to Hume: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern Philosophy [From Descartes to Hume] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 328.
2. For the second claim, see Jonathan Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume [Learning from Six Philosophers] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), vol. 1, 134-35.
3. This terminology is not always adopted. Marleen Rozemond, for instance, understands by the real distinction what I understand by substance dualism. See Marleen Rozemond, Descartes's Dualism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31.
4. Separability argument' is Bennett's name (Learning from Six Philosophers, 71).
5. Margaret Wilson (Descartes [London: Routledge, 1978], 186) calls it the 'epistemological argument'. It is also often called the 'conceivability argument'.
6. 'CSMK' stands for The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
7. Whether the argument is sound, and so whether Descartes really meets Arnauld's objection depends, among other things, on whether one can have a complete conception of the mind that does not include anything material. For discussion of this point, see Stephen Yablo, "The Real Distinction between Mind and Body" ["The Real Distinction"], Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16 (1990): 149-201, at 174-75.
8. Wilson, Descartes, 197.
9. Some commentators use 'quality' as I use 'property' (see Loeb, From Descartes to Hume, 83,
10. and Markie, "Descartes's Concepts of Substance," 75). The decision to use 'property' as an umbrella word is to some extent arbitrary, but the decision not to use 'quality' as an umbrella word is not arbitrary at all, since for Descartes the word 'quality' is a technical term like 'attribute' and 'mode' (AT VIII-1, 26).
11. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.xxiii.1.
12. So a principal attribute is general in the sense that all the other properties of a substance are modes of it, but not in the sense that two substances have numerically the same principal attribute. If this were the case, given the thesis that substance and principal attribute are not two distinct entities, it would follow that there is only one thinking substance, for example. So what makes two substances both thinking substances is that their principal attributes are of the same kind-not that their principal attributes are numerically the same. This also holds of extended substances, though here this point may be less important given that it is not clear that Descartes admitted a plurality of extended substances. (There are those who think that Descartes admitted a plurality of material substances; for instance, Matthew Stuart, "Descartes's Extended Substances," in New Essays on the Rationalists, ed. R. J. Gennaro, and C. Huenemann [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999] ;
13. those who think that Descartes admitted only one material substance, for instance, John Cottingham, Descartes [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], 84-85;
14. and Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry [London: Penguin, 1978], 128;
15. Stuart, "Descartes's Extended Substances," 88;
16. and Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers, 134.
17. This is a point that commentators sometimes miss. See, for instance, E. McCann, "Cartesian Selves and Lockean Substances," The Monist 69 (1986): 548-82, at 562.
18. Previously Markie had given another reconstruction of Descartes's independence conception of substance (Peter Markie, Descartes's Gambit [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986], 200).
19. Bennett, Learning front Six Philosophers, 66.