ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Rene Descartes formulation of the mind/body problem, particularly in relation to his experience of childhood and his use of his own imagination. It explores Descartes view with the Scholastic and Greek view of the mind and body to which he was responding. The chapter provides the Cartesian mind/body problem is not an inevitable development, still less a neutral, "objective", understanding but has a contingent history of construction. It provides Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables as an example of subsequent ways of thinking about the mind and body, children, and the imagination that is influenced by the Cartesian formulation even in its rejection of it by reclaiming pre-Cartesian ways of understanding the mind and body. Rene Descartes gave the most influential formulation of the mind and body for the time. Descartes is considered the father of modern philosophy because he inaugurated the epistemological turn.
