... dies. For Plato, the body and soul are in opposition as the soul wants to learn knowledge about the true forms whereas the body is just interested in empirical pleasures and needs which "takes away from us the power of thinking at all". Descartes reaches the conclusion that the nature of the mind (a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. Descartes views are known as Cartesian Dualism as he believed that the two do interact, however he struggled to come up with a feasible answer to how this interaction was possible. His dilemma was as follows: the soul influences the body every time it exercises an act of will; a body is only influenced by being pushed however the soul cannot exert a physical force. Descartes finally concluded that ...

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