This anomaly comes from the translation of the Greek 'ouisia' into the Latin 'substantia' and then the English 'substance'. — Wayfarer

Your insistence on claiming this with the same misspellings over and over is quite something.

So his position is a bit more complicated than the simplified version that is usually considered in the literature. (And I do not know how to represent it more accurately.) — Ludwig V

Point taken, and an important distinction. Nevertheless the depiction of the 'thinking thing' is very much the residue of his philosophy in popular culture. And it should be added, the fact that he found it necessary to try and account for the interaction between mind and body through the pineal gland, is also indicative of the sense in which he treats the mind as something objectively existent.

Here is my reference for this derivation. If you have an alternative derivation, do tell.

Perhaps "this body doubts"? — Janus

:wink:
One of the consequences of the approach Descartes takes is substance dualism. It's not, for him, the body that does the doubting.

Here is my reference for this derivation. If you have an alternative derivation, do tell. — Wayfarer

We have gone over this, some five times now. Including this "source" that does not back your statement.

The word is not "ouisia". It does not come to English from Latin, there is nothing Latin in English, it comes from French, as you would expect, as English is half French, especially the sophisticated vocabulary. And it simply means in scholastics "something that exists by itself", there is no problem conceiving something immaterial that exists by itself unless you are a close-minded physicalist.

Nevertheless the depiction of the 'thinking thing' is very much the residue of his philosophy in popular culture. — Wayfarer

Yes, indeed. If that passage had been taken more seriously, the history of philosophy might have been very different. Yet, he is so insistent on his substances that one has to admit that the "popular" presentation isn't wholly wrong.

The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, which means ‘something that stands under or grounds things’.

SEP on substance.
Lionino is right, however that it arrived in English from Old French.

c. 1300, substaunce, "divine part or essence" common to the persons of the Trinity;" mid-14c. in philosophy and theology, "that which exists by itself; essential nature; type or kind of thing; real or essential part;" from Old French sustance, substance "goods, possessions; nature, composition" (12c.), "

This difference made a big difference when it came to the empiricists' (especially Berkeley's) philosophy.

What's going on here is even weirder than that. Latin has a perfectly good equivalent for ousia, "being" in "esse". But somehow that got used for the Aristotle's phrase "en tôi ti esti" - literally "what it is to be". (Obviously, he can't find an actual Greek word for what he has in mind. His Metaphysics is riddled with his coinages.)
Then there's "exist". Wikipedia tells us that "The word "existence" entered the English language in the late 14th century from old French and has its roots in the medieval Latin term ex(s)istere, which means to stand forth, to appear, and to arise." (Note that our use of the word has absolutely no basis in ancient Rome.)
While we're at it, what about "real"? I don't know how reliable "etymonline.com" is, but it reports of "real" "early 14c., "actually existing, having physical existence (not imaginary);" mid-15c., "relating to things" (especially property), from Old French reel "real, actual," from Late Latin realis "actual," in Medieval Latin "belonging to the thing itself," from Latin res "property, goods, matter, thing, affair," which de Vaan traces to a PIE *Hreh-i- "wealth, goods," source also of Sanskrit rayim, rayah "property, goods," Avestan raii-i- "wealth". The meaning "genuine" is recorded from 1550s;"
All of which reinforces the point that medieval Latin is a dialect of Latin and very different from the language of ancient Rome.

I don't pretend that any of this has any particular philosophical significance. But I do think it is great fun.

And it simply means in scholastics "something that exists by itself", there is no problem conceiving something immaterial that exists by itself unless you are a close-minded physicalist. — Lionino

From Aristotle, "something that exists by itself", is commonly translated as "subsists", and this is understood as "having subsistence", therefore "exists by itself" is a predicate.

What's going on here is even weirder than that. Latin has a perfectly good equivalent for ousia, "being" in "esse". But somehow that got used for the Aristotle's phrase "en tôi ti esti" - literally "what it is to be". (Obviously, he can't find an actual Greek word for what he has in mind. His Metaphysics is riddled with his coinages.) — Ludwig V

"What it is to be", is the essence, or form of a thing. There's a very complex and difficult section of Aristotle's Metaphysics in which he explains how forms, or essences, must subsist. He does this through reference to "the good". It is impossible that the good itself is other than the form, or essence, of the good. And yet it is necessary that there is such a thing as the good. Therefore the good, must subsist, as a form or essence.

Further, he argues that all things, particulars, or individuals, must subsist, and each one's subsistence must be identical to its form or essence. For anyone who does not understand the concept of "matter" in Aristotle, this appears to leave no place for matter, because a thing itself is nothing other than its form, as indicated by the law of identity. However, matter as the potential for change. is understood as a general principle, and is therefore not properly a part of the thing itself.

Thanks for the overview of Aristotle. It does make sense overall, doesn't it?

Your version makes him seem much closer to Plato than some others that I have seen.

Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? — Banno

Grandma Mary believes that those who are not married lack maturity, that they, like Plato, are adolescents. That by not leading what she regards as a "normal domestic life" their development was arrested.

But it is Descartes who is the focus of her criticism, as if if he only he had married there would not have been the turn to subjectivism.

What Midgley does not mention is that Descartes' mother died a year after his birth, that he was sent away at about age ten to the Jesuit college of La Flèche, or that he had a daughter, Francis, who died at the age of five. Rather than a deliberate and immature choice to not develop attachments, his attachments were severed from him.

Descartes has come under a great deal of criticism for the mind/body problem but it is his view of the body as mechanistic that led to advances in medicine.

I doubt that Midgley would have disagreed with your account of Descartes. — Banno

Midgley claimed that for Descartes other people's existence had to be inferred. I said she was wrong about this. Do you think she would agree that she was wrong?

↪Fooloso4 Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? I doubt that Midgley would have disagreed with your account of Descartes. — Banno

It'll depend on how much of Midgley's point depends upon misconstruing Descartes. The article springboards against Descartes' alleged solipsistic starting point and methodology, even if he's not an outright solipsist. @Fooloso4 is substantively disagreeing with the article's construal of Descartes. Specifically how it construes his method as solitary and solipsistic.

So even if you end up agreeing with Midgley's conclusion, you can criticise how she gets there by (perhaps uncharitably) criticising Descartes.The dude was a mathematician and a natural scientist surrounded by all kinds of scholasticism and dogma, his methodological withdrawal thus could be construed as inspired by his mathematical inclination - as a means of cutting through what he couldn't outright say was ill thought out bullshit.

I also disagree with her emphasis on marriage. Although some are well suited to marriage and children, others are not. Her associating bachelorhood with immaturity raises the question of the extent of her interactions with a variety of different people

She refers to Aristotle but neglects to address the natural household relation that Aristotle discusses first, namely, master and slave. Nor does she address the numerous problems he discusses regarding marriage including war, destruction of cities, and revolution. Much of what he says regarding marriage centers around the division or labor and property. (Politics, Book 1)

As to Plato we know nothing of his private life or intimate relations. What we do know, however, is that several of his dialogues deal with love and friendship. The Republic raises serious concerns about marriage and its private, anti-communal effects.

From Aristotle, "something that exists by itself", is commonly translated as "subsists", and this is understood as "having subsistence", therefore "exists by itself" is a predicate. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok?

The dude was a mathematician and a natural scientist surrounded by all kinds of scholasticism and dogma — fdrake

Not only that, but he was afraid of the Church punishing him for his ideas, as he implies a few times in his books.

He was ultimately accused of atheism anyway — in the Netherlands I believe. He eventually went to Sweden somewhat against his will to teach the genius queen of Sweden Kristina under her invitation, whose tomb in the Vatican I had the pleasure of visiting these days.

Midgley claimed that for Descartes other people's existence had to be inferred. I said she was wrong about this. — Fooloso4

Is that what you were saying? It all got a bit muddled. Do you have an account to offer? How does Descartes conclude that others exist, without making an inference? Will you be defending substance dualism? Rationalism in the face of empiricism? What did Descartes get wrong, and what right?

The pop story of Descartes, which may well be wrong, is that he doubted as much as he could, until he arrived at what he considered a certainty. He then used this certainty to conclude that there was a god who was not deceiving him, and so "derived" the world as we see it. And it is this story that the aggravating Grandmother is using, questioning the method in use here for taking an extreme and contrived view of our place in the world.

Rings and Books reads now as a precursor to more recent streams in philosophical thinking such as enactivism and embodied cognition. On such views the self is constructed as much by others as it is by oneself. This is at odds with the views offered by Descartes, along with very many of those who preceded and followed him.

There's a neat, short account at Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

At the very least, it is worth recognising the challenges to our casual conceptualisations offered here: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

‘A person is a person through other persons.’

Then there's "exist". Wikipedia tells us that "The word "existence" entered the English language in the late 14th century from old French and has its roots in the medieval Latin term ex(s)istere, which means to stand forth, to appear, and to arise." (Note that our use of the word has absolutely no basis in ancient Rome.) — Ludwig V

There's an article on the IEP, 17th Century Theories of Substance, which says:

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

I think the background to this 'degrees of reality' was the 'scala naturae', the great chain of being, which provided a vertical dimension, with matter at the lowest level and the Divine Intellect at the top (and transcendant to existence). It is virtually extinct in subsequent Western thought, although I believe references to it are still found in some of the modern Thomists, for example in Jacques Maritain's rather daunting book The Degrees of Knowledge.

Lionino is right, however that it arrived in English from Old French. — Ludwig V

Descartes' Principia Philosophia was published in Latin, in which I presume the word 'substantia' would have been used (although I'm open to correction).

As for the meaning of ousia in Greek, there's an entry in IEP on its use in Plato and Aristotle here. Joe Sachs makes the observation:

And so a word (i.e. 'substantia') designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends.

(My personal heuristic is that classical metaphysics allows for a distinction between what exists and what is real which are generally assumed to be coterminous. I've had many lengthy and often vexed debates about this topic here over the years, centered around my claim that the term 'ontology' is concerned with 'the meaning of being', and not with 'the nature of what exists', which is the proper concern of the natural sciences. During the course of this debate, I was sent a reference to an apparently classic paper on this subject, The Greek Verb "To Be" and the Problem of Being, by Charles Kahn, which I feel actually rather supported my argument.)

Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? — Banno

I think Midgley makes a good point, and I generally enjoy reading her work, but I'm always interested in discussions of Descartes.

Descartes has come under a great deal of criticism for the mind/body problem but it is his view of the body as mechanistic that led to advances in medicine. — Fooloso4

You are right that we should not divide philosophers into good eggs and bad eggs, though that can make for a more exciting read. There can be both useful ideas and useless ideas in the work of any philosopher, and a balanced assessment needs to take both into account. I don't think anyone would fail to acknowledge the important intellectual developments in Descartes' work. But that doesn't mean we should forget about the mistakes that he made.

by not leading what she regards as a "normal domestic life" their development was arrested. — Fooloso4

Rather than a deliberate and immature choice to not develop attachments, his attachments were severed from him. — Fooloso4

as if if he only he had married there would not have been the turn to subjectivism. — Fooloso4

You are also right that we need to be cautious in tying specific ideas in the work of a philosopher to details of their biography. Philosophers, as Midgley herself observes, are human beings and consequently often flawed. We should not rush to judgement. Most people will probably turn out to have been a mixed bag.
Aristotle may have loved his wife and treated her, and his slaves, well by the standards of his time and thought the master/slave relationship was fundamental to a household. Plato may have been profoundly authoritarian and contemptuous of democracy and regarded love and friendship as fundamental to human life. Aquinas may have been quite humane and tolerant by the standards of his time and regarded one of the benefits of being in heaven as being able to enjoy the spectacle of the torments of hell. One could go on to look critically at Berkeley, Locke and Rousseau as well as Hegel and Heidegger. We can't ignore the bad bits, but forgetting the good bits is as bad as celebrating the good bits and forgetting the bad bits.

Long story short - if philosophy is to be a practice based on human life, if it is to recommend or be a way of life, then the hinterland and the sub-texts of philosophical texts are part of the story, which we should pay attention to even if we do not like what we see. But in exploring those aspects, we should extend to our predecessors the sympathy and charity that we must all hope our successors will extend to us when their turn comes to assess what we have done or not done.

What I've said is partial and incomplete and undoubtedly muddled. But I hope I may have persuaded you to at least read and consider the whole of Midgley's text, rather than just extracts from it. I don't think it is perfect, but I don't think it is as bad as you suggest.

My personal heuristic is that classical metaphysics allows for a distinction between what exists and what is real which are generally assumed to be coterminous. I've had many lengthy and often vexed debates about this topic here over the years, centered around my claim that the term 'ontology' is concerned with 'the meaning of being', and not with 'the nature of what exists', which is the proper concern of the natural sciences. — Wayfarer

There are many words of which it is futile to ask what their meaning is. These terms are among them, in my view. (I don't even really understand what the meaning of being is supposed to be.)

Lionino is right, however that it arrived in English from Old French.
— Ludwig V

Descartes' Principia Philosophiae was published in Latin, in which I presume the word 'substantia' would have been used (although I'm open to correction). — Wayfarer

This isn't affected by the history of the word in English, of course. But it is a nice example of how the arrival of a term in a text can have more than one origin.

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist.

Isn't there a view somewhere in Aristotle that things that best "realize" their form (essence) - i.e. realize their potential - are the best because most real. Something like that.

I think Midgley makes a good point, and I generally enjoy reading her work, but I'm always interested in discussions of Descartes. — Wayfarer

Well, I gather you more or less agree with substance dualism, a notion that I cannot see as coherent. I decide to move my hand, the damn thing moves; I take the drugs, the pain goes away. I can't see how such facts can be made to fit Descartes without folly.

But you are aware of my problems.

the fact that he found it necessary to try and account for the interaction between mind and body through the pineal gland, is also indicative of the sense in which he treats the mind as something objectively existent. — Wayfarer

Hey Jeep.

I thought that the causal closure of the material world and the immaterial world drove the need to explain how it was that minds could effect/interact with bodies and vice versa.

If the mind was completely independent from the body and vice versa, then it would not be possible to think that one was hungry, or in pain, or any number of other reductios.

One element in Descartes' session of doubt that is worth observing is the emphasis on not relying upon what we all experience as the basis of building theories. His own mistaken guesses are exemplars of that sort of thing.
The issues discussed in The Meditations are different from the Discourse on Method. Our world to explore if we are up to it.

Those are the kinds of questions that Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia put to Descartes (here.) It seems Descartes didn't really have very good answers. But then, Descartes was a pioneer, he was attempting to explore a very difficult subject from a truly novel perspective. Even though Husserl critiques Descartes, he still recognised him as the founder of transcendental philosophy.

Well, I gather you more or less agree with substance dualism, a notion that I cannot see as coherent. I decide to move my hand, the damn thing moves; I take the drugs, the pain goes away. I can't see how such facts can be made to fit Descartes without folly. — Banno

Consider this passage from Thomas Nagel "Mind and Cosmos":

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Pp35-36

Notice the implicit division between the objective and measurable, and the subjective and internal. There's the origin of the problem, in the Cartesian 'bifurcation of nature'. There are ways of mending the split, but I feel you won't find them in your usual sources of Quine, Austin, Davidson, and so on, as they still operate within those basic parameters and assumptions (Although it might be noted that Nagel is also an analytic philosopher, although dissident from the mainstream.)

An odd post. You point to the "Official Doctrine" (yes, Ryle) which is down to Descartes, but pretend it is a problem for analytic philosophy. It isn't, and never was.

Explaining how the ghost interacts with the machine is your problem.

Explaining how the ghost interacts with the machine is your problem. — Banno

Descartes' dualism is the origin of Ryle's 'ghost in the machine', surely. 'Analytic philosophy' is not a school of thought, but the English-language philosophers that I mentioned are operating within the overall paradigm which Nagel spells out.

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of the mind which is prevalent among theorists, to which most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe with minor reservations. Although they admit certain theoretical difficulties in it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory.... [The doctrine states that] with the doubtful exceptions of the mentally-incompetent and infants-in-arms, every human being has both a body and a mind.... The body and the mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body the mind may continue to exist and function. — Gilbert Ryle

One of the consequences of the approach Descartes takes is substance dualism. It's not, for him, the body that does the doubting. — Banno

That's true. I wasn't suggesting Descartes would think that, as I seem to remember (it's a long time since reading Descartes) that he thinks that the reality of the experience of embodiment could be doubted, that it could be an illusion or delusion. Of course I don't hold with that, I think such doubts (like 'brain in a vat') stupid, phony, pointless and toothless.

I was thinking more along the line of what we might be able to infer from the active awareness of doubt.

What is your claim? That the whole of analytic philosophy is infected with ghosts? Including Ryle?

You do understand that in your quote, Ryle is setting out his target, not defending a doctrine.

Of course I don't hold with that, I think such doubts (like 'brain in a vat') stupid, phony, pointless and toothless. — Janus

You left out "vapid". :wink:

Fuck, I knew there was something else!

You do understand that in your quote, Ryle is setting out his target, not defending a doctrine. — Banno

His target is, explicitly, Cartesian dualism of mind and body. That's the starting point of his book Concept of Mind. Ryle's solution to it is basically beaviourism - that categorisation of mind and body as two separate entities is a category mistake (which is the origination of that term), but then, the philosophy of mind that comes from that is essentially behaviourist.

What is your claim? — Banno

Again - my claim is that due to the form that Cartesian dualism assumed, that there is a kind of widespread, implicit dualism of mind and body or spirit and matter that is endemic in culture. And that the untenability of the idea of a 'thinking substance' or 'thinking thing' has had huge influence of philosophy of mind ever since, it is one of the principal causes of the dominance of physicalism in mainstream philosohpy (remember your surveys in which only 1% of respondents hold to alternatives to physicalism?) Which is implicit in the question you asked.

Ryle's solution to it is basically beaviourism — Wayfarer

Beaver-ism?

I should be the last person to draw attention to typos.

...essentially behaviourist. — Wayfarer

Well, no. See the entry in the SEP, and allow him some subtlety.

Again - my claim is that due to the form that Cartesian dualism assumed, that there is a kind of widespread, implicit dualism of mind and body or spirit and matter that is endemic in culture. And that the untenability of the idea of a 'thinking substance' or 'thinking thing' has had huge influence of philosophy of mind ever since, it is one of the principal causes of the dominance of physicalism in mainstream philosohpy (remember your surveys in which only 1% of respondents hold to alternatives to physicalism?) Which is implicit in the question you asked. — Wayfarer

If the physical is naturally understood to have substantial or substantive existence, and it is upon that idea of substance that the notion of reality is founded, and the idea of a mental substance is untenable, then what justification would we have for saying that anything non-physical is real?

The alternative to eliminative physicalism would be to say that mental phenomena are real functions of some physical existents, and that the only sense in which they are not physical is that they do not (obviously) appear as objects of the senses.