ABSTRACT
Human bodily action is of prime philosophical importance only insofar as it promises to reveal the human mind. Since Descartes, the question of the mind's role in bodily action has persisted. Human bodily action seems to arise from the interaction of two intrinsically different and irreducible realms - the mental and the physical. For Descartes, this aspect of action created the problem of explaining how an immaterial substance, the mind, causally interacts with a material substance, the body. Descartes' infamous solution was to provide a physical explanation by postulating the pineal gland as the causal link between mind and body.
