Daoism

Thesis Statement

Platonic dualism, in its commitment to metaphysical world of perfect forms is substantially different from Daoist Naturalism, which makes no such presupposition.

Introduction

Dualism in Metaphysics is the belief that there are two kinds of reality: material (physical) and immaterial (spiritual). In Philosophy of Mind, Dualism is the position that mind and body are in some categorical way separate from each other, and that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical in nature. It can be contrasted (both as a metaphysical concept and as regards Philosophy of Mind) with various kinds of Monism (including Physicalism and Idealism), and with Pluralism, which holds that ultimately there are many kinds of substance, rather than just two (Schreiner pp. 64-78).

Metaphysics—Dualism

Dualism appeals to the common-sense intuition of the vast majority of non-philosophically-trained people, and the mental and the physical do seem to most people to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties. Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them (known as qualia or the ways things seem to us ), whereas physical events do not. Critics of dualism have often asked how something totally immaterial can affect something totally material (the problem of causal interaction). With the knowledge gained from modern science, few, if any, neuroscientists would consider taking a dualist position, and Monistic beliefs like Physicalism are now much more common within the field of philosophy (Schreiner pp. 64-78).

Legacy of Plato

Dualism can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and also to the early Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy. Plato first formulated his famous Theory of Forms, distinct and immaterial substances of which the objects and other phenomena that we perceive in the world are nothing more than mere shadows. He argued that for the intellect to have access to these universal concepts or ideas, the mind must itself be a non-physical, immaterial entity.

Aristotle argued that if the intellect were a specific material organ (or part of one) then it would be restricted to receiving only certain kinds of information (in the same way as the eye is restricted to receiving visual data). Since the intellect is capable of receiving and reflecting on all forms of data, then it must not be a physical organ and so must be immaterial.

Neo-Platonic Christians identified Plato's Forms with souls and believed that the soul was the substance of each individual human being, while the body was just a shadow or copy of these eternal phenomena. For St. Thomas Aquinas, the soul was still the substance of the human being but, similar to Aristotle's proposal, it was only through its manifestation inside the human body that a person could be said to be a person (Moeller pp. 23-56).

However, Dualism was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th Century. Descartes was the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it exists today, and the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the physical seat of ...