DUALISM: ORIGIN, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, METHODOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

The dualism is a concept that implies that two elements are united in one thing. Normally, the mentioned elements can be opposite or complementary to each other to form a unit. Dualism in philosophy is the opposite current to monism. Monists tend to stick to positivist thinking.

In the case of religion, one can speak of good or evil, which are opposed, but together they create a reality. However, in another sense we can speak of complements such as the mind and the body, whose union makes up an individual.

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In recent years, dualism has emerged as expressed in the current known as critical realism, through which social phenomena are analyzed and interpreted taking into account the intervention of the individual in the fact studied.

For dualists, this current is the only one that contains the necessary tools to approach the realities of society in which people intervene, since by integrating the individual element, the matter cannot be treated from a point of view that seeks to suppress that subjectivity.

In dualism, normally, descriptions of specific problems are made and not exact and universal explanations.

Origin

Background

The idea of ​​dualism has been around in philosophy for a long time. It is seen for example in Pythagoras, who proposes the opposition between limit and unlimited, or between even and odd numbers.

Dualism is an idea that became popular among the Greeks, as was the case with Aristotle, who raised the existence of good and evil, although these notions had been worked before in similar theories.

Others who were interested in raising dualist proposals were members of the group of philosophers known as atomists.

But dualism took shape through Plato's postulates in which the world of Senses and Forms spoke about the world. To the former it gave negative characteristics, while the latter tended towards perfection.

The Neoplatonists were in charge of making a bridge between the two worlds that Plato proposed, achieving it through the doctrine of emanation. This theory of the Neoplatonists is attributed to Plotinus and Proclus, and in it it was stated that all things in the world come from a flow of primordial unity.

However, at that time the word "dualism" had not been conceived, nor the modern concept of this philosophical current.

Then Catholicism, with Saint Thomas Aquinas, took up this theory to support the fact that at the end of time the souls would rejoin the body that corresponded to them and could participate in the Final Judgment.

Dualism

The main foundation of the theory of dualism that is known today comes from what René Descartes raised in his work Metaphysical Meditations.

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According to Descartes, the mind is the thinking thing or res cogitans; she is accompanied by the body, which is that which exists physically and what she called the extensive res. According to his approach, animals did not have a soul, since they did not think. Hence the famous phrase: "I think, therefore I exist."

But it wasn't until 1700 that the term "dualism" was first coined in the book called Historia Religionis Veterum Persarum, written by Thomas Hyde.

The postulates of Descartes served as the basis for what is known as "Cartesian dualism", which is the basis of all branches of modern dualism. This is applied in different sciences, especially in social ones.

The approaches of Descartes were taken by philosophers like Locke and Kant to reinforce their own theories. The latter, for example, showed in his propositions the difference between "pure reason" and "practical reason."

Types of dualism

Some of the currents in which dualism has been poured from its original postulates are the following:

-Interactionism.

-Epiphenomenalism.

-Parallelism.

Dualism in Plato

One of the first thinkers to tackle the subject was Plato in Athens, during the fifth century BC.

The Athenian separated the universe into two worlds: an immaterial one made up of idealized concepts, the world of Forms, and one of real, tangible and material things, the world of Senses.

In the world of Forms only lived that which was pure, ideal and immutable. Beauty, virtues, geometric shapes and, in general, knowledge, were elements that belonged to that world.

The soul, as a receptacle of knowledge, and being immortal was also part of the world of Forms.

In the world of the Senses there was everything that was compound, real and changing. The beautiful, the virtuous, which are the tangible representations of the forms and anything that could be perceived by the senses, belonged to that world. The human body, which was born, grew and died was part of him.

According to the philosopher, the soul was the only thing that could go between the two worlds, as it belonged to the field of Forms and provided life to the body at birth, becoming part of the world of Senses.

But the soul left the body behind at the moment of death, becoming an essence belonging, once again, to the world of Forms.

Furthermore, in his work Phaedo, Plato postulated that the existence of everything starts from its opposite. The beautiful had to be born from the ugly, the slow from the fast, the just from the unjust and the great from the small. They were complementary opposites.

Anthropological dualism

Anthropological dualism can find its roots in what Descartes proposed: individuals have a mind and a body. Then, only the union of both aspects can make up a person in an integral way.

The theory of Cartesian dualism has had many other philosophers as followers in its worldview, as was the case with Locke and Kant. However, it was Tacott Parsons who managed to give it a shape that is suited to the study of the social sciences.

Talcott Parsons. By Max Smith. via Wikimedia Commons.

The individual is included in two great fundamental aspects for their development. First, it is related to the extensive res, which has a direct link with sociology and the tangible system in which the individual interacts, which is the social system in which he operates.

But also people at the basic or individual level are immersed in the res cogitans which is called "mental substance" and which is related to the surrounding culture, as far as anthropology is concerned.

Still Cartesian dualism has a great influence on the vision of modern anthropology that has tried to delimit the differences between the physical and the ideal, for example, by separating ritual from belief.

Epistemological dualism

In the field of knowledge there is also an epistemological branch that is directly related to the approaches of the current of dualism.

Epistemological dualism is normally linked to qualitative research, which positions it as an alternative opposite to epistemological monism, on which quantitative research currents are based.

Currently, epistemological dualism has evolved to what is known as critical realism, which is separated from that related to the metaphysical, although it continues to be the subject of criticism as to the veracity of the knowledge derived from it.

The response to the comments made by monists about the epistemological acuity of dualism were answered by the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, who stated in a text that for critical realists the object is not inferred, but affirmed.

Sellars also clarified that for the dualists the knowledge of a thing is not the thing; on the contrary, he explained that knowledge takes elements from the external nature of the object in an interaction with the data it offers, that is, a dialogic reality.

For epistemological dualism, knowledge and content are not the same, but neither does it intend to create a fictitious relationship of causality in the phenomena, but rather to know the data and its relationship with the object.

Methodological dualism

The methodology is understood as one of the aspects that epistemology addresses. In other words, that epistemological dualism corresponds to its methodology, which is qualitative and equally dualistic. However, the latter focuses on the lines that serve as guidelines in the investigation.

In the social sciences there are disciplines that have managed to circumscribe their methodology to the monistic current, but those who opt for dualism state that social phenomena can only be approached taking into account the factor of context.

The research modality that implements the dualistic methodology is applied to social phenomena. With this an approach to them will be elaborated, through the description, which is influenced by the interpretation and particular casuistry.

As the human factor is involved as a variable, it is not possible to approach the phenomenon as an objective situation, but is influenced by the circumstances and the environment. This situation leaves the monistic approach without the necessary tools to explore this phenomenon.

Some of the tools that methodological dualism uses are interviews, participant observation, focus groups, or questionnaires.

However, despite the conditions being the same, if two people work in parallel in an investigation of a social phenomenon, their results could differ.

References

1. Sellars, RW (1921) Epistemological Dualism vs. Metaphysical Dualism. The Philosophical Review, 30, no. 5. pp. 482-93. doi: 10.2307 / 2179321.
2. Salas, H. (2011). Quantitative Research (Methodological Monism) and Qualitative (Methodological Dualism): The epistemic status of research results in social disciplines. Moebio tape n.40, pp. 1-40.
3. BALAŠ, N. (2015). ON DUALISM AND MONISM IN ANTHROPOLOGY: THE CASE OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ. Department of Anthropology at Durham University. Anthro.ox.ac.uk Available at: anthro.ox.ac.uk.
4. Encyclopedia Britannica. (2019). Dualism - philosophy. Available at: britannica.com.
5. Robinson, H. (2017). Dualism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Plato.stanford.edu. Available at: plato.stanford.edu.
6. Iannone, A. (2013). Dictionary of World Philosophy. New York: Routledge, p.162.
7. En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Phaedo. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.