what does mind-body mean and what was Descartes contribution to that problem?

Rene Descartes (1596-1650 ) is considered to be one of the most prominent philosophers of the past few centuries and is even called the father of modern philosophy . Indeed , his importance is hard to overestimate as Descartes was one of the first philosophers of his time who refused to accept philosophical dogmas on which Medieval philosophy was based . With such a fundamental approach Descartes introduced many important concepts and is known as the thinker who changed the relationship between theology and philosophy , who mounted the still urgent problem of knowledge and attempted to

unite philosophy with new sciences of his time , notably with mathematical principles . But among the problems that Descartes inspected , one problem is particularly interesting - it is his famous Mind - Body Problem which even nowadays is the source of heated debates . To better understand the essence of this problem we should remember that Descartes attempted to find only completely undisputed sources of knowledge and by rejecting numerous assumptions previously considered to be axiomatic he retreated to what he found to be the most basic undeniable fact - I think therefore I am . Now , the fact of the presence of something thinking is for Descartes more fundamental than the fact of the presence of material objects in the world , including our own bodies . And it is here that the Mind - Body Problem blossoms Indeed , under some points of view our body may seem alien to our mind and this observation forced Descartes to postulate existence of two fundamentally different substances - souls (which have the property of thinking ) and matter (which has the property of spatial extension . This opposition is also called Cartesian Dualism . Of course , Descartes was not the first , and definitely not the last , to wonder about the apparent dissimilarity between matter and consciousness . However , his contribution to the actualization , even popularization , of this problem was significant because his figure and the way he presented Mind - Body Problem would become one of the main targets of critique or approval for his such influential followers as Kant , Leibniz , Locke , Hume , Spinoza and many other thinkers up until our time

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