Chapter 13 Axel Hagerstrom at the Origins of the Uppsala School
The problem of consciousness became thorny from Descartes onward. His infamous interactionist dualism (Seager 2007, 9) between res cogitans (mind) and res extensa (matter) was at the origin of a host of philosophical problems and eventually gave rise to a number of different trends in epistemology and ontology, among which the two basic, all embracing, and opposite kinds of monism, that is, philosophical idealism and philosophical realism.