Descartes Rene and Baruch There

Descartes

Rene and Baruch

There can be little doubt that Rene Descartes' role in the emergence of modern science was instrumental in the perception of a definition of psychology being at variance with that which was existent during the time of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Largely due to the methodology employed by the French philosopher, he was able to provide a foundation for all sciences -- including psychology, which is the science of how the mind works and various other aspects of cognition -- to truly begin in a manner that can consistently be demonstrated and proven. Descartes' analytic style of presentations on the subject of science and knowledge examines the root causes of what is known within a specific field of study, and attributes those causes to some necessary source that provides the foundation for them. Doing so allowed Descartes to not only provide new definitions and aspects of various scientific processes and fields of studies, but also to surmount many of the conceptions that applied to those fields before, as the following quotation sufficiently demonstrates. "In establishing the ground for science, Descartes was at the same time overthrowing a system of natural philosophy that had been established for centuries" (Smith, 2010).

However, it should be noted that Descartes' distinction between the mind and the body does not necessarily apply to Baruch Spinoza's views in regards to intellect. Descartes traditionally contended that the mind and the body were wholly separate entities, and that the processes and applications of one were entirely inconsequential to that of the other. This duality of existence of these two entities is underscored by the following quotation, in which Descartes "reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other" (Skirry, 2006). Spinoza, on the other hand, primarily viewed the mind and the body as different aspects of a unified process stemming primarily from God. The philosopher differed radically from Descartes in the fact that he believed that every physical manifestation to be found (and evidenced of a body or a sensory perception of something) stemmed from an idea. Spinoza contended that thoughts begot the physical process of motion, creation, or any other physical application, and that the intellect which produced such thoughts and the physical manifestations of them should therefore not be considered distinct from one another. It is noteworthy to mention that Descartes also held a an alternate account of the mind-body dualism in which he conceded there could be some incomprehensible union, for which he offered no explanation for and therefore cannot defensibly be compared to Spinoza's conception of this union (Ross, 1998).