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Descartes vs Armstrong (Descartes (Questions (Outline Descartes’s example…

- - - - Descartes’s states that When looking at people through a window all that is really seen are coats and hats. Our mind tells us it is a person, our senses merely tell us what we can see.
    - - Descartes uses the example of candle wax to demonstrate how a body changes and moves however when it is changed it may still remain a piece of wax. He uses it to ask about the body and if it is changes, is it still a body. (bodies only known by understanding). He also uses the Wax to show how the senses are unreliable, it tastes, smells, looks and feels different, however the mind knows it is still wax.
    - - As the mind thinks and has to exist to think. However, the body is the minds manifestation and the carrier of the mind. The mind has to be real but the body doesn’t. ‘bodies are not properly speaking known by the sense or the faculty of the imagination, but by the understanding only”
    - - Descartes thinks that his essence is that of a thinking thing as to exist you have to be able to think and to think you must exist. You do not have to have a body to exist but you must have a mind.
    - - The category mistake states that Descartes “should be making a clear distinction between and thing and what it does”. I do somewhat agree with this criticism. Descartes does not make the distinction between what something is and what is does. However, the statement “he hasn’t actually proven that whatever I am” “I cannot be physical” I don’t find to be entirely true, Descartes does somewhat outline that the mind may not be entirely physical, but I never seems to become a certainty that he must exist, more of an idea.
    - - Privileged access in philosophy commonly states that a person (also known as a subject or self) has their own access to their thoughts, knowledge of these thoughts and self-knowledge that another person would not have of the particular ‘self’. This concept relates to Descartes views on the mind-body problem as the person (or self) can only perceive the world through their own thoughts and perceptions. The Wax example relates to this. The mind is aware that the wax, is in fact, wax. Regardless of its change of form, smell, taste and texture. The self can only be aware of this distinction through their own ‘privileged accesses to their thoughts and self-knowledge.
  - - - What sort of thing is “I”? =
      - Descartes is a thinking thing by definition =
      - How do I know things about the world around me? (wax / hats and coats)=
      - Are things better known by the mind or through the senses? =
      - Wax argument/ hats and coats=
      - We know things through the mind, not the senses (the mind is both better know and a better knower than the body) =