Rene Descartes, his disciples and the ‘Corporeal’

So far as the physicists are concerned, moreover, it would seem that most are little inclined to the investigation of philosophic foundations; and even then it appears that their scientific prowess does not always carry over into the philosophic domain…

Excerpt: The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key, Wolfgang Smith, Suhail Academy, Lahore 2005, p. 26 – 28

By the ‘corporeal world’ we shall henceforth understand the sum total of things and events that can be directly perceived by a normal human being through the exercise of his sight, his hearing, and his senses of touch, taste and smell; which is to say…that the corporeal domain is no more and no less than the actual world in which we normally find ourselves.

But ofcourse this affirmation, simple and indeed obvious as it is, will immediately be challenged by the [Cartesian] bifurcationist, on the grounds that what we perceive is not a world at all – not an external reality – but a private phantasm, of which only certain quantitative features have an objective significance…The recognition, therefore, of what may be termed the principle of non-bifurcation amounts to a rediscovery – or a reaffirmation, if you will – of the corporeal world, a world which according to Descartes and his disciples does not exist…Yet this philosophy has been very much bred into us through the educational process, so much so that it may come as something of a shock to be told outright that the perceived world is indeed real, and that we are not after all mistaken during most of our waking life…But be that as it may, it is no easy task to cut the Newtonian knot…for even though bifurcation as such may hold no particular attraction, it does confer the considerable benefit of apparently bolstering the claims of a physics that would be totalist in its scope…

So far as the physicists are concerned, moreover, it would seem that most are little inclined to the investigation of philosophic foundations; and even then it appears that their scientific prowess does not always carry over into the philosophic domain. As Heisenberg has well said:

If one follows the great difficulty which even eminent scientists like Einstein have in understanding and accepting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, one can trace the roots of this difficulty to the Cartesian partition. This partition has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes, and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality. (Physics and Philosophy, New York, Harper & Row, 1958, p.81)