I think that Rene Descartes gives a more convincing way of thinking about the body than Gilbert Ryle presents to us in “The Concept of Mind”. Ryle argues against holism, which is the belief that the body is not made up of parts but is a whole thing. In “The Concept of Mind”, Ryle first explains about how “It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements” (page 200). Then he claims that this and other beliefs are ridiculous. I may not believe that this is the correct view but I believe that Ryle is more convincing.

The new understanding of the human body that Leder suggests in order to avoid the problem with Cartesianism is the concept of the ‘lived body’. “The term ‘lived body’ derives from the German Leib. In German, the term Leib is employed when one is referring to living bodies, while the term Korper is used to designate inanimate or dead bodies: the body of a rock, for example, or of a human corpse” (page 122). He says that the body of a living being has a unique construction and it can not be illustrated by the language and ideas used to explain inanimate nature. This is saying once again that the body can not be compared to a machine because each has qualities that are

Some topics in this essay:
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