Lynda Gaudemard

There is a legend about Descartes that we all know of. According to this legend, Descartes claimed that there are two kinds of fundamental substances existing separately from each other: nonphysical substances (the mind/self/soul), whose essence is thought, and physical substances, whose essence is spatial extension. This legend claims that, for Descartes, the non-material mind or soul can exist or think apart from the body, and that body can exist apart from the mind; but despite their opposite nature, the mind and body can causally act on each other. According to this legend, physical things are public and observable, while mental things are private and are only accessible by introspection. Lastly, for Descartes, to think is necessary to be conscious; while human beings are conscious, animals are unconscious, and are only machines.

The emergentist reading of Descartes that I propose in this book is mainly challenged by Descartes’s real distinction argument found in the Sixth Meditation. In this argument, Descartes concludes that the mind can exist without the body. Many scholars argue that, for him, the mind does not need the brain to exist. If this separatist interpretation is true, then Descartes’s real distinction argument is not consistent with any kind of emergentism requiring a physical basis. That is why I will begin on this thought. In this section, I will provide a detailed analysis of the argument and argue that it does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the mind can exist apart from the body. Instead, I argue that the real distinction argument proves that the mind and the body are different and opposite kinds of subjects of inherence. As we shall see, this soft substance dualism fits better with Descartes’s views of the substance and of human beings.

In the previous chapters, I showed that the traditional separatist interpretation of Cartesian mind-body dualism should be rejected because it is not consistent with Descartes’s conception of substance, of human being, and of imagination. For Descartes, a substance is a thing existing on its own without being the modeor the attributeof something else. Since the human being has two attributes, Descartes cannot consider human beings as substances. Furthermore, imagination, considered as a general property, belongs to the essence of the mind. If imagination belongs to the essence of the mind, then the mind is not created by God independently from the body. These three claims lead to conclude that Descartes’s real distinction argument is not separability regarding to existence, but an actual separation regarding to the subjects of inherence.

While imagination was a major concern for Descartes throughout his work, Cartesian scholars have paid little attention to this faculty, especially regarding to the Meditations of First Philosophy. This article highlights the epistemic role of imagination in the First Meditation. I argue that the way Descartes’s conception of imagination is elaborated in the First Meditation helps question our interpretation of his dualism, and enables us to formulate the hypothesis that imagination belongs to the essence of the mind. It results that Descartes’s dualism should not be interpreted as separation (or separability) regarding to existence.

Malgré l’adoption de la Convention Internationale des Droits de l’Enfant en 1989, la question de savoir pourquoi l’enfant devrait détenir des droits fait toujours débat. En raison de sa jeunesse, l’enfant est habituellement considéré comme n’étant pas suffisamment rationnel pour détenir les mêmes droits que les adultes. Mais l’enfant est aussi reconnu comme une personne humaine dont les droits ne devraient pas être entravés. Bien que durant les vingt dernières années, les études en droits de l’enfant se soient multipliées, ce domaine de recherche ne semble plus progresser significativement. Peut-être la question des droits de l’enfant, habituellement comparés aux droits de l’Homme, pourrait-elle être différemment posée. En effet, comprendre pourquoi un enfant devrait avoir des droits implique de réfléchir à ce qui peut limiter ses droits et donc, en premier lieu, à ce qui fonde moralement les droits parentaux. Cet article réinvestit la question des droits de l’enfant à partir d’une nouvelle perspective qui n’est pas celle des droits de l’Homme, mais celle des fondements moraux des droits parentaux. Une perspective déjà adoptée au XVIIème siècle par le philosophe britannique John Locke sous la forme de la théorie de l’investissement parental.

This monograph presents an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, which differs from the standard reading called 'classical separatist dualism' claiming that the mind can exist without the body. It argues that, contrary to what it is commonly claimed, Descartes’s texts suggest an emergent creationist substance dualism, according to which the mind is a nonphysical substance (created and maintained by God), which cannot begin to think without a well-disposed body. According to this interpretation, God’s laws of nature endow each human body with the power to be united to an immaterial soul. While the soul does not directly come from the body, the mind can be said to emerge from the body in the sense that it cannot be created by God independently from the body. The divine creation of a human mind requires a well-disposed body, a physical categorical basis. This kind of emergentism is consistent with creationism and does not necessarily entail that the mind cannot survive the body. This early modern view has some connections with Hasker’s substance emergent dualism (1999). Indeed, Hasker states that the mind is a substance emerging at one time from neurons and that consciousness has causal powers which effects cannot be explained by physical neurons. An emergent unified self-existing entity emerges from the brain on which it acts upon. For its proponents, Hasker’s view explains what Descartes’s dualism fails to explain, especially why the mind regularly interacts with one and only one body. After questioning the notion of emergence, the author argues that the theory of emergent creationist substance dualism that she attributes to Descartes is a more appropriate alternative because it faces fewer problems than its rivals. This monograph is valuable for anyone interested in the history of early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind.

This paper explores the interaction between medicine and metaphysics in modern natural philosophy and especially in Descartes ' philosophy. I argue that Descartes ' hypothetical account of birthmarks in connection with his embryology provides an argumentative proof of the metaphysical necessity of a substantial union between mind and body, which however does not threaten his doctrine of the real distinction between these two substances. It would appear that his argument relies on a temporal conception of alethic modalities and provides a new answer to Henricus Regius who in 1641 claimed that, for Descartes, the human being is an ens per accidens.

Most contemporary metaphysicians think that a teleological approach to mereological composition and the whole-part relation should be ignored because it is an obsolete view of the world. In this paper, I discuss Descartes’s conception of individuation and composition of material objects such as stones, machines, and human bodies. Despite the fact that Descartes officially rejected ends from his philosophy of matter, I argue, against some scholars, that to appeal to the notion of disposition was a way for him to maintain teleological reference within a mechanistic conception of nature. Through a study of Descartes’s texts, I also want to make clear why it might be difficult to entirely ignore teleological notions, when one wants to account for composition and unity of material objects.

The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body.