Cartesian Composites and the True Mode of Union

ABSTRACT

Descartes argues that the mind and body are really distinct substances. He also insists that minds and bodies compose human beings. But how are mind and body united to compose a human? This question is crucial to understanding the place of human beings in Descartes’s ontology. Many scholars argue that Descartes has no solution to the unity problem, and they call into question the ontological status of mind-body composites. On some views, Cartesian humans are mere aggregates, like stacks of pancakes; on other views, Descartes is not entitled to the view that humans exist at all. I argue that Descartes has a solution to the unity problem, and that he appropriates this solution from contemporaneous Jesuit discussions of soul-body unity—discussions that remain mostly unknown to contemporary scholars. The upshot is that Descartes has the metaphysical machinery to account for mind-body unity and doesn’t have to say that a human being is like a stack of pancakes.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• dualism
• union
• mode
• Arriaga

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Suárez’s works are cited by their divisions and the volume and page numbers of the Vivès edition.

2 Early modern scholastic texts are cited by page number, column, and paragraph number. This rule excludes Suárez, we saw, who is cited by the standard divisions of his works as well as by the volume, page, and column of the Vivès edition.

3 This realist reading is endorsed by Adams [1989 II: 638], Wippel [2000: 312–26], and Brower [2014: 32, 121].

4 Other proponents of this interpretation or a version of it include Yandell [1999], Pasnau [2011: 600–2], and Perler [2016: 375].

5 A similar passage is quoted by Normore [2011: 233], but its implications are left unexplored.

6 As always, I owe special thanks to Martin Pickavé and Marleen Rozemond for commenting on multiple drafts of this paper. I presented this paper at the University of Groningen in June of 2018 and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in February 2019. Thanks to both audiences for helpful feedback. I also owe thanks to two anonymous referees for comments that led to definite improvements of the paper.