1710
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Emotion involves the body, thinking uses the mind, imagination hovers between them [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
Most affections (like anger) seem to involve the body, but thinking seems distinctive of the soul. But if this requires imagination, it too involves the body. Only pure mental activity would prove the separation of the two.
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From:
Aristotle (De Anima [c.329 BCE], 403a08-)
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A reaction:
What an observant man! Modern neuroscience is bringing out the fact that emotion is central to all mental life. We can't recognise faces without it. I say imagination is essential to pure reason, and that seems emotional too. Reason is physical.
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5011
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There are two ultimate classes of existence: thinking substance and extended substance [Descartes]
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Full Idea:
I observe two ultimate classes of things: intellectual or thinking things, pertaining to the mind or to thinking substance, and material things, pertaining to extended substance or to body.
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From:
René Descartes (Principles of Philosophy [1646], I.48)
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A reaction:
This is clear confirmation that Descartes believed the mind is a substance, rather than an insubstantial world of thinking. It leaves open the possibility of a different theory: that mind is not a substance, but is a Platonic adjunct to reality.
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24039
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All the emotions seem to involve the body, simultaneously with the feeling [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
The affections of the soul - spiritedness, fear, pity, confidence, joy, loving, hating - would all seem to involve the body, since at the same time as these the body is affected in a certain way.
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From:
Aristotle (De Anima [c.329 BCE], 403a16)
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A reaction:
Aristotle was not a physicalist, but this resembles the pilot-in-the-ship passage in Descartes, accepting the very close links.
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1514
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Early thinkers concentrate on the soul but ignore the body, as if it didn't matter what body received the soul [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
Early thinkers try only to describe the soul, but they fail to go into any kind of detail about the body which is to receive the soul, as if it were possible (as it is in the Pythagorean tales) for just any old soul to be clothed in just any old body.
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From:
Aristotle (De Anima [c.329 BCE], 407b20)
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A reaction:
Precisely. Anyone who seriously believes that a human mind can be reincarnated in a flea needs their mind examined. Actually they need their brain examined, but that probably wouldn't impress them. I can, of course, imagine moving into a flea.
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