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the princess elizabeth argument

the princess elizabeth argument. Materialism: Human persons are wholly material—every part of a person, including the mind, is a material body. Dualism : Human persons are not wholly material—they have both material bodies and immaterial minds .

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the princess elizabeth argument

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  1. the princess elizabeth argument

  2. Materialism: Human persons are wholly material—every part of a person, including the mind, is a material body. Dualism: Human persons are not wholly material—they have both material bodies and immaterial minds.

  3. Nature likewise teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case, I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just as a pilot perceives by sight when any part of his vessel is damaged…

  4. Interactionism: Minds and bodies enter into direct, two-way causal interactions. Cartesian Dualism=Dualism+Interactionism

  5. For it seems that all determination of movement takes place by the propulsion of the thing moved, by the manner in which it is propelled by that which moves it, and by the qualification and shape of the surface of this latter.  Contact is required for the first two conditions, and extension for the third.  You yourself entirely exclude extension from the notion you have of mind, and touching seems to me incompatible with an immaterial thing.

  6. For example, on the supposition that gravity is a real quality, about which we know no more than its power of moving the body in which it occurs towards the centre of the Earth, we find no difficulty in conceiving how it moves the body or how it is united to it; and we do not think of this as taking place by means of real mutual contact between two surfaces…

  7. the princess elizabeth argument • If Cartesian Dualism is correct, then immaterial minds affect the motion of material bodies. • If immaterial minds affect the motion of material bodies, then they exert force. • If immaterial minds exert force, then they have mass and occupy space. • Immaterial minds don’t have mass or occupy space. • [So] Cartesian Dualism is incorrect.

  8. An event e is causally overdeterminediff there are two distinct and causally unrelated events which are both causes of e.

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