Mind-Body Problem

René Descartes was the first Western philosopher to formulate the problem in its modern form. In his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes argued that mind (res cogitans, thinking substance) and body (res extensa, extended substance) were categorically distinct — yet somehow causally interacted. He proposed the pineal gland as the site of this interaction, a conjecture his contemporaries found philosophically untenable. The resulting question — how an immaterial mind moves a physical body — became the foundational problem of philosophy of mind.