Substance Dualism and the Privacy of Mind in Rene Descartes's Philosophy: A Critique of the Superficial Interpretation

In this article, the author questions the traditional reading of Descartes's metaphysical principles by analytic philosophers of mind. In this reading, Descartes is considered to be the father of substance dualism and the defender of the privacy of mind. The author argues that such reading is controversial and needs to be revisited. The first part of the article deals with Descartes's ontology. Here, the author examines the concepts of substance, attribute, and mode by Descartes and argues that his dualism is not substance dualism but property dualism. The reason behind this is twofold. First, according to Descartes, a substance cannot be known without its attributes. It means that attributes play a key role in the knowledge of any substance and are epistemologically prior to it. Second, Descartes did not employ the concept of substance in the sense of the "stuff" things are made of. He was more inclined to the logical sense of this concept as the subject of predication. The author supports her last claim by reconstructing Descartes's argument for the existence of two different substances, i.e., mind and matter, based on the difference between two kinds of attributes, i.e., mental and physical ones, co-existing in a human being. The logical sense of the concept of substance does not force us to take any ontological commitments about the "stuff" of mind and matter. In such interpretation, mind and matter are just different subjects of predication for mental and physical properties that cannot exist independently of any subject. The second part of the article is devoted to Descartes's epistemology. Challenging the common idea that the privacy of mind was Descartes's invention, the author the shift from the privileged access to mind to the privacy of mind he allegedly made. In Descartes's view, we enjoy the privileged access to our minds as compared with the access we have to our bodies and not to the minds of other human beings. However, this argument still leaves the possibility for the problem of other minds to be posed. The more decent argument the author develops later is that Descartes's philosophical system avoids the problem of other minds because the main theoretical assumption built into it concerns the primacy of conceptual thinking over the Ego principle. In short, one needs to know how to apply the concept of mind before one is able to reveal the existence of one's Ego and mind itself. Since the problem of other minds is no longer a threat to Descartes's system, it could be argued that he did not adopt the thesis of the privacy of mind. The article concludes by pointing out the necessity to focus more on the philosophical figures of the past to avoid the misinterpretation of many contemporary philosophical problems.