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Previous Volume 351:1365 September 23, 2004 Number 13 Next

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By Paul Bloom. 271 pp., illustrated. New York, Basic Books, 2004. $26. ISBN 0-465-00783-X.

Paul Bloom's premise in Descartes' Baby is that we are natural-born dualists. As infants, we instinctively divide the world into physical objects and mental states, and we reason differently about the two. Babies find it perfectly natural for a person to begin moving without coming into physical contact with anything but are surprised if an object moves under the same conditions. Out of the dichotomy between things and people grows our conviction that body and mind are distinct entities — that physical things are driven by principles such as solidity and gravity and immaterial minds are driven by emotions and . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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