Locke against Descartes

This chapter considers Locke’s criticisms of Descartes’s views about the mind. Although Locke grants that dualism might be true (i.e., that human beings might have an immaterial mind), he thinks the Cartesian version of that view is false. The chapter focuses on two topics within Locke’s discussion of Descartes’s views: whether we have an innate idea of God, and whether the mind is always thinking. On the first issue, Locke rejects the view of Descartes (and More, Cudworth, and others) that we have an innate idea of God, but also rejects Hobbes’s view that we have no idea of God. On the second issue, Locke opposes Descartes’s view that the mind is always thinking, as well as his related view that thinking is the principal attribute of the mind, and indeed his metaphysical scheme of substance, principal attribute, and mode.

Management model of primary health services and interprofessional practice in Brazil

Background Brazilian primary health care is organized by decentralized Family Health Strategy composed with interprofessional teams. This study focused on finding out how are the relationship between the management model of primary health services and interprofessional practice. Methods Qualitative study, part of a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with health managers from six Brazilian municipalities. Data were collected between October and December 2018 and applied content analysis. Results The results allow three major content categories, 1) “Characteristics of management models to support interprofessional practice”: continuous communication among managers, health care professional and patients is the principal attribute of management. The interviewed mentioned the need to communicate with teams using regular meetings and technological resources. They recognize the availability of interprofessional practice in favour of dialogue, shared decision and physical space. In order to patient engagement, they adopted open communication with patients focused on spontaneous demands. 2)”Management actions for comprehensive care”: the interviewed recognized the lack of services integration and interprofessional teams. They mentioned participatory management strategies as team meetings in health services and engagement in public health council to shared health planning. 3)”Challenges for management interprofessional practice”: Challenges considered the lack of permanent policies focused on patient needs, frequent changes of the municipal managers and health care professionals, the lack of planning actions, and the need to meet spontaneous management demands. Conclusions Management practices can support interprofessional practice and comprehensive care however challenges are related to non-permanent policies, unplanning actions and spontaneous management demands. Key messages Communication is the principal attribute of the management model of primary health services to reinforce interprofessional practice. Compreehensive care depends on patient and interprofessional teamwork engagement for share decision making.

Henry More, Supporter and Opponent of Cartesianism

Henry More was one of Descartes’s earliest English supporters, but later became one of his most vigorous critics. This chapter explores the philosophical connections between the two, focusing particularly on their views on body and spirit. More regarded life, not thought, as the principal attribute of immaterial substance, and he increasingly rejected Cartesian mechanism in favour of a vitally animated physical world. The principal attributes of body were impenetrability and discerpibility (i.e. divisibility, though ultimately into indivisible atoms). Body could not be defined in terms of extension, More argued, because spirits were extended too, space was really distinct from body, and a vacuum was possible (though not actually existent).

Modes and Composite Material Things According to Descartes and Locke

This chapter deals with the ontology of bodies in Locke’s Essay. In Descartes’s ontology, a created substance, or its principal attribute, unifies the many modes that belong to that substance; by contrast, Locke’s ontology includes not only substances and their qualities, but also composite entities which contain substances but are unified by modes. Locke, it is argued, seeks to adapt the apparent unity of living things, e.g. oaks, horses, and human beings, to the (Cartesian) mechanistic doctrine that matter is a substance. His concepts of inner constitution and identity are designed to give a metaphysical account of the unity of the ordinary entities that are salient in our experience. There is nothing corresponding to this in the Cartesian texts. They purport to explain the unity among qualities of mercury, salt, etc., and the processes carried on by plants and animals on the basis of physical theory, not metaphysics.

Bayle and Panpsychism

Pierre Bayle shows that, in order to avoid devastating objections, materialism should postulate that the property of thinking does not emerge from certain material combinations but is by nature present everywhere in matter – a hypothesis recently revived and labelled “panpsychism.” There are reasons for entertaining the idea that Bayle actually considers this enhanced materialism to be sound, as it might use the same line of defence that Bayle outlined for Stratonism. However, this would lead to a view similar to Locke’s superaddition theory, and I contend that such cannot be Bayle’s position because he embraces the Cartesian principle that each substance has only one principal attribute. As a consequence, for Bayle any system that conjoins thought with matter in the same simple substance is untenable. By contrast, this makes clear which kinds of metaphysics and epistemology modern panpsychists need to adopt in order to defend their view.