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Rene Descartes Wax Argument

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Rene Descartes Wax Argument
What is dualism? What is the essence of the Res Cogitans? Explain in detail how Descartes discovered this essence. Explain the “piece of wax argument.” What does the “wax argument” prove? How does Descartes prove that corporeal substance exists and that the mind is separate and distinct from the body? * Do you find his argument convincing? Why or why not? Give reasons for your answer. (*Be sure to discuss, God, the distinction between types of ideas, and the distinction between the two substances.)

Dualism consists of substances, which include corporeal things and thinking things. The essence of the mind is thought be the essence of the body but its extension. Human bodies and their properties are objects of sense perception. Minds and …show more content…
My body and my mind cannot be one and the same, because I should either know both of them or know neither of them. Since I know I am a thinking thing, and know that my body and my mind are two separate things, I can conclude that I am not a bodily thing. Therefore, I am only a thing that thinks." In so arguing, however, Descartes would commit the so-called "intentional fallacy" of basing an argument on what one does not know. If two things had to be either both known or both not known in order to be identical, we could argue that Bruce Wayne and Batman are not one and the same as …show more content…
By "thing," Descartes could simply be using the word as we do today, as an ambiguous throwaway word when we don't want to be more specific. More likely, though, he is using it to mean substance, the fundamental and indivisible elements of Cartesian ontology. In this ontology, there are extended things (bodies) and thinking things (minds), and Descartes is here asserting that we are minds rather than bodies. Of course, "thinking" is also highly questionable. Does Descartes mean only the intellection and understanding that is characteristic of the Aristotelian conception of mind? Or does he also include sensory perception, imagination, willing, and so on? At the beginning of the Second Meditation, the Meditator has cast sensory perception and so on into doubt, but by the end of the Second Meditation, sensing, imagining, willing, and so on are included as attributes of the mind. This question is further explored in the commentary on the next
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