Some Remarks on the Notion of “Cartesian Dualism” in Continental Philosophy
In the beginning of the 20th century, Western philosophy split into two main schools, analytic and continental philosophy, that – barring exceptions – neither read nor understand each other. My own work and influences are mostly within, or closely affiliated with, the analytic school, but occasionally I read some continental philosophy (as well as some non-Western philosophy). One peculiar term I encountered several times in such reading across scholastic boundaries is “Cartesian dualism”, most recently in Saito Kohei’s Marx in the Anthropocene. To be more precise, it is not the term itself that struck me as peculiar – you’ll find...
Technological Immortality
Seven years ago I published a paper arguing against afterlife beliefs and various other kinds of “death denial” titled “The Incoherence of Denying My Death”. The denial of death in this sense is not a denial of physical or biological death so much as it is a denial of annihilation. In that paper I distinguished two ways of denying death, which are distinguished essentially by which word in the short proposition “I die” they deny. Strategy 1 denies the dying part – that is, it argues that I somehow (can) survive my physical/biological/bodily death. Strategy 2 denies the “I” in...