Philosophy mind and world - Essay Example

ogic of premises, claims and conclusion whereas Heidegger’s philosophy demands deep understanding of metaphysics in order to decipher the same distinction between the self and its existence. Descartes offers proof in the discourse in his arguments of the six meditations in which he explains the distinction between mind and body while Heidegger elucidates the self on the basis of metaphysics. It can be argued that Rene Descartes has been more successful in undertaking the task of explaining ‘Next I examined attentively what I was’ than Heidegger.

While Descartes defines the difference in the mind and body in his theory of dualism in stages of meditation and the experience of the person who undergoes hierarchy of meditation Heidegger’s explanation is based purely on metaphysics and philosophical sciences. Descartes’ explanation can be understood by pure logic of premises, claims and conclusion whereas Heidegger’s philosophy demands deep understanding of metaphysics in order to decipher the distinction between the self and its existence with reference to philosophy, mind and the world.

Descartes’ explanation through meditation ‘ Next I examined attentively what I was’ I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in , I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed.

From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think and which does not require any place or depend on any material thing in order to exist (Hatfield, Descartes, and p246). The empirical “Descartes observed: "Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and