ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes and his critics set up a number of problems that philosophers are still working on to this day. Descartes did attempt to locate the mind in the brain, based on a limited knowledge of anatomy. But he could not have anticipated the relevance of his philosophy of mind to the contemporary development of cognitive science, where discussions of the relation of the mind to the brain hold center stage. Contemporary scientists who attempt to explain the workings of the brain still face Descartes's troubling question about mind–brain interaction—with one made of thought, the other of matter. Cartesian dualists challenge the idea of equating the brain and the mind, a thesis that commonly goes under the name of "physicalism". Perhaps the two most influential twentieth-century critics of Descartes are the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. In both of their outlooks one can detect a shift away from the centrality of the individual thinker as the starting point in philosophy.
