Renee Descartes was one of the greatest philosophers of all time. He came up
with the conclusion that the mind is totally separate from the body. He believed that the
mind was a thinking thing and the body was just something that occupied space. He
believed the body was very divisible, while the mind was indivisible. He said the mind
was used to think and unable to tell between any parts of a person. He said the mind was
not affected by any parts of the body except the brain. Nature and our senses teach us
that we possess a body. For example, when we feel pain we know that something is
wrong with our body. When we are hungry and thirsty we know we need something to
eat and to drink. If a person had no body then they would be nothing but a thinking unit,
and would have no senses. I totally agree with Descartes idea of the mind being separate
from the body. The mind is just a thing that does our thinking and our body is our
physical being. However, they work together so that we can function normally as a
Another idea of Descartes was the existence of material things and how we
perceive them. He talked about two different ways that we interpret things: imagination
and pure understanding. He gives the example of thinking about a triangle. In his mind
he knows a triangle has 3 sides and he can see the triangle in his head. This is what he
called imagining because he could imagine what the triangle would look like. Then when
he thinks about a figure with 100 sides he knows by pure understanding that the figure
has 100 sides to it. However, he can not imagine the figure in his head and what it would
look like in real life. Descartes came to the conclusion that when the mind understands, it
turns towards itself and looks at one of the ideas within it. He also believed that
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