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  • Descartes’ Dualism by Gordon Baker, Katherine J. Morris
  • Alan Hausman and David Hausman
Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris. Descartes’ Dualism. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xiv + 235. Cloth, $49.95.

“. . . today’s philosophers are like savages listening to the speech of highly sophisticated men: they put the oddest interpretations on Descartes’ words and draw the strangest conclusions from them”

(148). [End Page 318]

This is a unique, remarkable, difficult book. It offers a new, often startling view of a Descartes who is almost totally misrepresented by modern historians and analytic philosophers. In fact, Descartes would hold this modern interpretation, Cartesian Dualism (CD), as so close to the views he was trying to overcome as to be virtually indistinguishable from them (197). The main contention is that Descartes’s notion of mental substance has almost nothing to do with the modern conception of it, which is anachronistically read back into his work: Descartes in fact held that mental substance is the seat of rational—usually, moral—judgment, with sense perception, feeling, and especially inner sense having crucial bodily counterparts. Sense perceptions are something mental only in the sense that they are expressed in judgments relating to our overall well being. The actual raw feels discussed today under the rubric of qualia, and so often attributed to Descartes’s view of mental states, are absent from both their bodily and judgmental manifestations (99–100). The mind as the repository of all mental acts, of raw feels and reasoned judgments, is a view he disdains. We then see that the modern claim that these feels and sense experiences are mental particulars, like sense data, leads to disaster for CD. Wittgenstein’s private language argument, allegedly fatal to Descartes, is a direct result of treating mental events as particulars, hence as private; indeed, on CD, privacy becomes the hallmark of the mental. The interpretation, unfortunately, is more interesting than the resulting Descartes. It is consistent, powerful, and strongly textually based. On the other hand, Descartes’s paternity of modern philosophy, as the authors themselves admit, is in serious question. He becomes instead a brilliant orator for a bygone, Aristotelian age (195, 200).

What led the authors to these views? First, they find the belief commonly attributed to Descartes about animals—that they cannot feel pain—to be so ludicrous that he could not possibly have held them. Second, they believe the entire view of CD a setup for modern philosophy of mind to vindicate itself against the errors of its forebears—CD thus presents one of the great straw men in philosophical history. That is curious, however, considering the authors think of Descartes as one of the last Aristotelians and their interpretation would require that his most famous contemporaries missed this as well. The authors claim Descartes, holding to certain nonempirically confirmable (and unmotivated in the book) Aristotelian metaphysical principles, would not have been impressed by any empirical evidence to show that animals have the capacities he claims they lack.1 The authors here (205ff.) invoke Kuhnian principles close to incommensurability between CD and their real Descartes, though they mount a highly interesting defense of the claim that even so, Descartes might have a lot to tell us about our own metaphysical possibilities.

The authors’ initial amazement at CD’s position on animal feelings, however, is quite misleading. They argue that Descartes thinks animals see, and feel pain, but ironically, the correlative sense of consciousness they explicate is not interesting from the raw feels point-of-view. Surely it is that alleged denial of raw feels in animals [End Page 319] which is constitutive of the CD interpretation, outrage at which provides a motivation for the book! Even if it is akin to a category error to ask Descartes to provide respite—given his alleged attitude toward his Aristotelian categories and the accompanying view of sentience they explicate—the point remains that the SPCA would hardly be satisfied.

They are right to reject a CD claim that Descartes has sense data; sense perceptions are not particulars. With respect to the semantics of such perceptions though, in both of their manifestations, the authors’ interpretation is peculiarly deficient. The authors’ obsession with the alleged...

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