Descarte's Subversion through Functionalism
“Body am I, and soul”—thus speaks the child. …But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.1 In 1643, Descartes was asked in a letter from Princess Elisabeth, how a thinking substance can affect a corporeal animal, so as to produce ‘voluntary action’.2 Yablo claims recently, that Descartes’ division of the substances has resulted in being the primary motivating force behind the great, longstanding philosophical debates surrounding dualism between the mind and the body....