r0b’s Reviews > Philosophy of Mind > Status Update

"In attempting to deal with this difficulty, Malebranche introduced the theory 'occasionalism' to the effect that, on the occasion when the alarm rings, God produces in the mind the hearing of the alarm. But this desperate attempt to explain the correlation of mental and physical without resorting to direct causal action between them has never appealed to the modern mind."
...as I said, hilarious...

"In attempting to deal with this difficulty [of the parallelist theory], Malebranche introduced the theory 'occasionalism' to the effect that, on the occasion when the alarm rings, God produces in the mind the hearing of the alarm. But this desperate attempt to explain the correlation of mental and physical without resorting to direct causal action between them has never appealed to the modern mind."
p. 64

...the person theory seems to end with the absurdity that a person's body is not a _physical_ thing."
P. 56-57

"It is essential to persons, on Strawson's conception of them, that they be entities which necessarily have _both_ mental and bodily attributes...
It is then, one of the paradoxical implications of the person theory that the body which a person has cannot be conceived of as a physical object subject to the laws of the physical world...

"Confronted on the one side by the English materialist Hobbes and on the other side by the French dualist Descartes, Spinoza said, in effect, a plague on both your houses."! :)

...hilarious...