ABSTRACT
Few notions about the history of philosophy aremore widely held than the notion that Descartes began something important in the way we think about the mind. But what exactly did he begin? A good place to look for an answer to this question is the start of his caustic set of replies toGassendi, whereDescartes claries a point of terminology. On his usage, he explains, the term ‘mind’ should be taken not in the traditional way, as referring to a part of the soul, but as referring to the whole soul. Hence the two terms, ‘mind’ (mens) and ‘soul’ (anima), are to be treated as co-referential: ‘I consider the mind not as a part of the soul, but as the whole soul that thinks.’1 To be sure, this is no mere point of terminology. On the contrary, his erasure of the distinction between mind and soul constitutes the most fundamental respect in which Descartes’s conception of mind has inuenced our own. In fact, one might reasonably think of this passage as marking out a kind of dividing line between medieval psychology and modern philosophy of mind.
