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René Descartes
Philosopher, mathematician · 1596–1650
Descartes formalized the mind-body split that would define Western modernity. His Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) located the self entirely in thinking substance (res cogitans), rendering the body as mere mechanism (res extensa). "I think, therefore I am" is the sentence that exiled feeling from the definition of selfhood. Everything Homer knew about the interior — that it has organs, that it fills and hardens, that suffering sediments into value — becomes meaningless in a framework where interiority is reduced to cognition. Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error (1994) is the neuroscientific rebuttal, demonstrating that reasoning itself depends on somatic markers and embodied feeling.
Key Works
- Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
- Discourse on the Method (1637)
- Passions of the Soul (1649)
What Did Descartes Do to the Soul?
Descartes did not deny the soul’s existence. He redefined it as thinking substance, stripping it of every somatic, affective, and embodied quality that Homer, the Stoics, the Church Fathers, and the alchemists had attributed to it. The body became a machine. The interior became the mind. The feeling function, which had operated as the primary organ of evaluation for two millennia, was reclassified as a mechanical disturbance of the animal spirits running through the pineal gland (Passions of the Soul, 1649). This is not a villain’s act but a philosopher’s — and the consequences have shaped every institution of modern life.
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