Metaphysicians have been concerned with the mind-body problem even since Plato introduced the idea of dualism thousands of years ago. However it did not really become a major issue of argument until the seventeenth century when French philosopher Rene Descartes published his views concerning the mental and physical world. Basically he attempted to answer the questions, "How are the mind and body related?" and "What is their fundamental nature?" He concluded that though the distinct worlds of physical and mental events seem varying in many ways, experience in general indicates they are somehow linked or interrelated (Priest 44). Bothered by Descartes" claim that something of the material world can affect that of the immaterial world and vice-versa, many metaphysicians constructed their own theories - and still do - concerning the nature of mind and body and the apparent relationships between them. This paper is thus dedicated to listing some of the most frequently accepted of these digressing theories and in turn to refuting their arguments as unsuccessful attempts to discredit the theory of dualism.
The broadest and most opposed argument to dualism is the Materialistic theory. Materialists suspect the problem with Descartes" Cartesian theory lie in his premise that the mind and body are separate entities from one another. They instead declare that the mind and body in fact are really one and the same type of substance and that this substance is completely material (Popkin 105). Both physical and mental events could thus be explained using pure physical principals and laws. Such a theory resolves the problem of the interrelations between mind and body, introduced because of the accepted idea that material only affects material. This theory became greatly advanced during the time of Descartes by Thomas Hobbes whose argument goes as follows:.
Premise 1: Physical motion in the material world can only produce further .
