ABSTRACT
Modern philosophy of mind begins with Descartes. This is not to say that this field of philosophy was born into a vacuum in the middle of the seventeenth century: one could begin an historical survey of its central concerns by reviewing positions before Descartes. One could begin profitably, for example, by examining the arguments of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, or any number of the other great thinkers of the past. What one could not do, however, is to begin such a survey by looking at historical positions that come after Descartes. Why is this? We can begin to understand why this is so when we realize that modern philosophy of mind is almost exclusively concerned with the mind/body problem; how meaning, rationality and conscious experience is related to, or arises from, a material world which, in itself, is devoid of such characteristics. In its present form this is a problem we owe almost entirely to Descartes and his contemporaries. Thus, the straightforward answer is that the Cartesian turn in philosophy sets up this problem and then proceeds to give us both a classic statement of the issues involved and a particular position which philosophers have continued to argue for and against.
