Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What is Matter? The seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes had an elegant answer to this question: the essence of matter is extension—extension in length, breadth, and depth. And since Descartes also held that the mind is indivisible while everything extended is divisible, the classic mind-body problem was born: How are we to find a place for the mind in a material world? But the material world has changed fundamentally since the seventeenth century, or at least our conception of it has, and we no longer have an elegant answer to the question, "what is matter?" if we have an answer to it at all. This course grapples with the difficulty of understanding the concept of matter (as well as its close relative, the physical) and explores some implications of "the thinning of matter" for our philosophical theorizing about mind and meaning in a post-physical world.