
The correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia - pshaw
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-mind/ghost-and-princess
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zkomp
Always felt Descartes kind of cheated himself with his very categorical
denounciation of the body and the animals as mere thoughtless automatons.

Leibniz and Spinoza (the other 2 of the 3 great 16th century rationalists)
have more nuanced views, esp Spinoza who in his Ethica said something like:
Descartes was a very bright man who non the less fooled himself with the idea
of the pineal gland as seat of the soul. Etc

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danielam
The Cartesian metaphysical tradition has had an enormous impact on our
thinking to this today, often without us realizing it. Materialism itself,
which opposes the dualism of Descartes, only makes sense within the Cartesian
paradigm. Far from wholly rejecting his metaphysics, it merely rejects the
immateriality of the mind, preserving the impoverished view of matter that
Descartes held to be true. Indeed, Cartersianism frames much of the discussion
in contemporary philosophy of mind, determining what the problems are and what
the solutions might be, if there are any. Philosophers committed to that
metaphysics are inevitably forced into dualism, panpsychism or eliminativism.
All three suffer from serious issues, the worst of which is eliminativism, the
most Procrustean and incoherent of the bunch.

Ultimately, Descartes did not disprove the Aristotelian and Scholastic
metaphysics[0]. He merely dismissed it.

[0] Moliere's famous bit in "The Imaginary Invalid" fails because, while the
appeal to dormitive powers is minimally informative, it is not tautological.

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austincheney
Most times I see Descartes quoted it is with the paraphrase: _" I think
therefore I am"_ which is a really poor abstraction of his 6 Meditations.

