The topics to be covered in this chapter are as follows: (I) Locke's acceptance of Descartes's view that there is a radical separation, a perhaps unbridgeable gap, between the world's mental and its physical aspects; Locke's view of (II) the cognitive aspects and (III) the conative aspects of the mind; (IV) what Locke said about the possibility that “ matter thinks” that is, that the things that take up space are also the ones that have mental states; (V) the question whether all thought could be entirely caused by changes in the physical world; (VI and VII) what it is for a single mind to last through time; and (VIII) what it is for a mind to exist at a time when it is not doing anything.

PROPERTY DUALISM

Descartes held a position that is sometimes called “property dualism.” According to it, the properties that things can have fall into two classes - those pertaining to materiality and those pertaining to mentality - with no overlap between them. This is best understood as involving also a dualism of concepts: the concepts that can be applied to things fall into two classes, with no concept in either class being reducible to or explainable through any belonging to the other class.