Descartes' embodied psychology: Descartes' or Damasio's error?
Damasio (1994) claims that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity separate from the body, and that the effort to understand the mind in general biological terms was retarded as a consequence of Descartes' dualism. These claims do not hold; they are "Damasio's error". Descartes never considered what we today call thinking or cognition without taking the body into account. His new dualism required an embodied understanding of cognition. The article gives an historical overview of the development of Descartes' radically new psychology from his account of algebraic reasoning in the early Regulae (1628) to his "neurobiology of rationality" in the late Passions of the soul (1649). The author argues that Descartes' dualism opens the way for mechanistic and mathematical explanations of all kinds of physiological and psychological phenomena, including the kind of phenomena Damasio discusses in Descartes' error. The models of understanding Damasio puts forward can be seen as advanced version of models which Descartes introduced in the 1640s. A far better title for his book would have been Descartes' vision.
Kirkebøen
G
G
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. geir.kirkeboen@ilf.uio.no
D003071:Cognition; D004644:Emotions; D005602:France; D049670:History, 17th Century; D006801:Humans; D009488:Neurosciences / Q000266:history*; D010686:Philosophy, Medical / Q000266:history*; D011584:Psychology / Q000266:history*