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Descartes’ cogito, as it has come to be called, made mind more certain for him than matter and led him to the conclusion that the two were separate and fundamentally different. The Cartesian division between mind and matter has had a profound effect on Western thought. It has taught us to be aware of ourselves as isolated egos existing “inside” our

the inventor of one of the most valuable thinking tools of all time, the system of “Cartesian coordinates” that enables us to translate between algebra and geometry, paving the way for calculus and letting us plot almost anything we want to investigate, from aardvark growth to zinc futures.

The distinction between mind and matter, which has become a commonplace in philosophy and science and popular thought, has a religious origin, and began as the distinction of soul and body. The Orphic, as we saw, proclaims himself the child of earth and of the starry heaven; from earth comes the body, from heaven the soul. It is this theory that Pl

So he concluded that minds like his (and yours) were not material entities, like lungs or brains, but made of some second kind of stuff that didn’t have to obey the laws of physics—articulating the view known as dualism, and, often, Cartesian dualism. This idea that mind isn’t matter and matter can’t be mind was not invented by Descartes.

the Cartesian division, the humanities concentrating on the res cogitans and the natural sciences on the res extensa.

Descartes sought sanction directly from the Pope to use human bodies for his dissections, to study anatomy and properly demonstrate his point of view and analysis of function. He argued that human behaviour itself was evidence of the fact that the mind and the body were entirely separate. Thus, when the Pope sanctioned dissection on the grounds tha