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1. INTRODUCTION
FOR DESCARTES the mind is radically different from the body-it is an incorporeal, thinking thing. One of the most frequently raised questions about this view is: how can mind and body interact if they differ in this way? This question has troubled numerous philosophers, and Descartes himself addressed it on several occasions. Many have charged that his dualism is incompatible with mind-body interaction. Bernard Williams has used the phrase "the 'Scandal' of Cartesian Interactionism.1 In a more moderate vein, I will follow R. C. Richardson and speak of the Heterogeneity Problem.2
This problem is often treated as if it was new with Descartes's dualism because his view that the mind is incorporeal is usually approached as if new. But the incorporeity of the mind or the soul was surely not a novelty introduced by Descartes. In the history of Western philosophy it is at least as old as Plato-a fact often ignored in discussions of Descartes's dualism. More directly relevant to Descartes, the incorporeity of the mind was generally accepted by the Aristotelian scholastics, although their conceptions of mind and body were also different in important ways. And, what is particularly interesting for my purposes here, the scholastics saw serious obstacles to mind-body interaction.
In this paper I will focus on only one direction of interaction, the action of body on mind, which Descartes discusses most frequently in relation to sensation. I will focus in this paper on sensation. In discussions of the Heterogeneity Problem in Descartes it is usually assumed that there is just one question, which concerns interaction in both directions.3 But we shall see that both Descartes and the scholastics treated the two directions of interaction in very different ways. Nevertheless for the sake of brevity I will sometimes speak of mind-body interaction where only the action of body on mind is at stake.
A question we must ask ourselves is: what exactly is the problem with mindbody interaction for the view that the mind is incorporeal? The first purpose of this paper is to examine what Descartes and the scholastics thought about this question. I will argue that neither saw the Heterogeneity Problem, the brute fact that mind and body are radically different, as a source of trouble. The...