THE ONTOLOGICAL CAUSATION

Abstract

The current debate on mind-brain reductionism brings about the resurgence – or Renaissance – of Cartesianism. This problem, which can in essence be subsumed not just under philosophy or psychology, but primarily under neurosciences, proves historically to be the culmination of mind-body dualism introduced by René Descartes in the modern philosophical discourse in the 17th century. Descartes’ method to differentiate the mind, defined as a purely thinking and non extended substance (res cogitans), from the material and extended body (res extensa) is clearly an ontological attempt which became well-established in the history of Modern Philosophy as substance-ontological-dualism. The Cartesian dualism, postulated and substantiated in Meditations, is based on an epistemological differentiation between the recognizability of mind from that of body, as distinctively expressed in the method of doubt or negation (of all mental perceptions and attributes of bodies). If the mind can be separately identified as opposite to the body, this cognition rests eventually upon the irreducible ontic difference between mind and body.