Natasha asked:

Please can you explain Descartes' influence on philosophical considerations of the idea of the
mental?

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Descartes introduced the idea of the subject and individual consciousness into philosophy. He
highlighted the rational nature at the expense of the emotional, moral and intersubjective side of man
and it could be said that Descartes had a de-humanising influence on the philosophy of mind. The
criticism that there need be no more to the thought than the propositional content and that the "I" is
superfluous makes Cartesianism even more anti-humanistic, since the mental becomes pure
conceptual content and the subject himself is lost. Analytical philosophy of mind has concentrated a
great deal on the nature of rationality and the proposition and the acquisition of concepts and all this
stems from taking man as essentially rational and has dominated philosophy of mind at the expense
of the phenomenological nature of the mental which is explored in continental philosophy.

Descartes' position that the mental cannot be explained by the physical is still widely accepted, and
although the problems of Cartesian dualism (combined with advanced biological and neurological
knowledge) have led to a massive swing in the direction of identity theories, the problem of
consciousness which Descartes introduced into philosophy mind remains problematic for these
modern theories.

The cogito gives rise to scepticism about the external world so another thread in philosophy is how
the mind is related to the world. The res cogitans is a subjectivity with no objective counter-part. This
has given rise to consideration about the nature of subjectivity and objectivity. A slightly different
question is how we can know things about the world given that we might be dreaming. This does not
simply give rise to problems of knowledge, but affects philosophy of mind because it means that we
need to make a distinction between philosophy/metaphysics and psychology. We, as Descartes
noted, would have to mad to really doubt our senses, which brings to light a strange duality between
rational thought or theory (or philosophising), and real practical life.

Another thread in the idea of the mental, consciousness itself, has taken a curious turn. Since Freud
introduced the idea of unconscious it has been difficult for us to take ourselves as thinking things or
purely conscious beings. Rather we are driven by unconscious forces, keeping the dark side of our
nature at bay through repressive mechanisms. However in the post-Freudian, Lacan, we see a return
to the Cartesian subject: The subject, as far as he is known to himself, is a rational subject, or at least
a subject immersed in language.

Rachel Browne