Personhood – Philosophy

One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct—a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other.

This argument gives rise to the famous problem of mind-body causal interaction still debated today: how can the mind cause some of our bodily limbs to move (for example, raising one’s hand to ask a question), and how can the body’s sense organs cause sensations in the mind when their natures are completely different?

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What is this online course about?

This short Online Interest Course covers the history of the founding of Israel, the early wars in the region as well as the impact on Palestinians. This leads into a look at the modern Arab-Israeli conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s longest-running and most controversial conflicts. At its heart, it is a conflict between two self-determination movements — the Jewish Zionist project and the Palestinian nationalist project — that lay claim to the same territory. From a nation born from the Holocaust to a people fighting for civil rights. In the modern era the relationship between Israel and Palestine is characterised as either an ‘Occupation’ or as a ‘Fight against terrorism’ with distrust and fear ruling on both sides.