Kirkebøen G
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
J Hist Neurosci. 2001 Aug;10(2):173-91. doi: 10.1076/jhin.10.2.173.7255.
Damasio (1994) claims that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity separate from the body, and that the effort to understand the mind in general biological terms was retarded as a consequence of Descartes' dualism. These claims do not hold; they are "Damasio's error". Descartes never considered what we today call thinking or cognition without taking the body into account. His new dualism required an embodied understanding of cognition. The article gives an historical overview of the development of Descartes' radically new psychology from his account of algebraic reasoning in the early Regulae (1628) to his "neurobiology of rationality" in the late Passions of the soul (1649). The author argues that Descartes' dualism opens the way for mechanistic and mathematical explanations of all kinds of physiological and psychological phenomena, including the kind of phenomena Damasio discusses in Descartes' error. The models of understanding Damasio puts forward can be seen as advanced version of models which Descartes introduced in the 1640s. A far better title for his book would have been Descartes' vision.
达马西奥（1994）声称，笛卡尔将思维想象成一种与身体分离的活动，并且由于笛卡尔的二元论，以一般生物学术语理解心灵的努力受到了阻碍。这些说法并不成立；它们是“达马西奥的错误”。笛卡尔在考虑我们今天所谓的思维或认知时，从未不考虑身体。他的新二元论需要对认知有具身的理解。本文对笛卡尔全新心理学的发展进行了历史概述，从他在早期《规则》（1628年）中对代数推理的论述，到他在晚期《灵魂的激情》（1649年）中的“理性神经生物学”。作者认为，笛卡尔的二元论为各种生理和心理现象的机械论和数学解释开辟了道路，包括达马西奥在《笛卡尔的错误》中所讨论的那种现象。达马西奥提出的理解模型可以被视为笛卡尔在17世纪40年代引入的模型的升级版。他的书一个更好的标题本应是《笛卡尔的愿景》。
