Deep-seated and often implicit beliefs about what should go through for knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, the good life, are generally acknowledged to be fundamental to the way we think and act in life. An important intellectual challenge in this regard is finding one's way among the increasing variety of theoretical perspectives, ideologies and truth claims that abound in scholarly fields. In this view, science is regarded as part of, created by and, hence, embedded in human culture. A still unresolved question and debate arising from this state of affairs is: should we continue in our knowledge endeavors to follow the old, analytic tradition of Western sc

Descartes’ Theory of Substance Dualism Throughout the history of man, philosophers have tried to come up with an explanation of where our minds, or consciousness, came from and how we are able to have a nonphysical characteristic of ourselves. Does our physical brain automatically give us nonphysical characteristics like feelings, thoughts, and desires or is there something else there, the mind, that interacts with our bodies and makes us feel, think, and desire? Also, is the mind the only nonphysical entity in our universe or do other entities exist such as ghosts or souls? One man came up with a theory to explain the two different properties in our universe in which he called Dualism.

One major flaw found in Descartes’ argument is that while critically examining, and then rejecting, mostly everything in the world around him, he maintained that he could prove the existence of God, beyond a shadow of a doubt. For thousands of years, people have been trying to prove God’s existence but he has yet to be successful. It seems to me that Descartes showed a display of arrogance in supposing that he could devise a method of proving the existence of God, doing so without a great deal of difficulty. At one point in his discourse on method, Descartes sets out a code of morals, which he plans to abide by. It is quite apparent from this passage, that Descartes had accepted and embraced the idea of God long before he even began to question it. With this pre-judgment of God’s existence, he could not possibly have made a fair and accurate conclusion as to whether or not God really exists. The fact that he was so ready and willing to accept God’s existence, while being so critical of everything else around him illustrates how careful he was to prove a God of power and benevolence. He then used his idea of God to explain and justify his existence and everything else he wants to prove as “clearly and distinctly” in his argument. If Descartes were to have rejected the ideas of God and religion, he would have had a much harder time proving his own existence and the existence of elements, which he believed to be true. Had this not been the case, I see no way in which Descartes could have come to feel that he had been able to provide such a secure proof of God and his own existence.

He realized that he knew nothing for certain except the fact that he was thinking which proved that he existed; “cogito ergo sum.” Descartes argue that all ideas that are as clear and distinct as the cogito must be true, for, it they were not, then cogito also, as a member of the class of clear and distinct ideas, could be doubted. Descartes theorized that each person had an innate idea of a perfect being.

ience, or does it serve mankind (and especially intellectuals as creators of new ideas and understandings) better to become "contextualizers", "story-tellers", "faith healers" or "conversationists"? Perhaps more pointedly, should one have to choose at all?

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