Episode 3403
Dualism
Sat, 2026-Aug-29 00:47 UTC
Length - 3:22
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.
The featured article for Saturday, 29 August 2026, is Dualism.
Dualism is a family of views that propose a fundamental division into two separate principles or kinds. It typically emphasizes a sharp distinction between independent or antagonistic sides, but in a broader sense, it also includes theories in which the two sides are correlated or complementary. Dualism contrasts with monism, which rejects any fundamental division, and with forms of pluralism that posit more than two basic principles.
Dualist views span many domains and disciplines. Mind–body dualism holds that mind and body are fundamentally different. It includes substance dualism, which interprets mind and body as distinct substances able to exist independently, and property dualism, which characterizes them as separate kinds of properties of the same substance. Ethical dualism targets the contrast between good and evil, regarding them as antagonistic forces that govern human conduct and the cosmic order. Platonic dualism divides reality into the intelligible realm of timeless Forms and the sensory realm of mutable matter, with similarities to the distinction between abstract and concrete objects in the contemporary discourse. Epistemological dualism holds that the object of perception is different from the real object, positing an essential gap between experience and reality. Dualist views also include the Chinese doctrine of yin and yang, conceiving reality as an interplay of two correlated forces, theological dualisms that distinguish God from the world, and the nature–culture divide contrasting the innate state of nature with human practices and institutions. Other dualisms are found in value theory, legal theory, physics, and indigenous belief systems. Critics argue that dualism ignores continuities, oversimplifies reality, creates pseudoproblems, or introduces evaluative biases.
Dualist thought has its roots in antiquity as a key theme of various religious traditions, such as Zoroastrianism, Jainism, the yinyang school, Samkhya, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism. Abrahamic religions were generally suspicious of dualism, while competing schools of thought along the monism-dualism spectrum emerged in medieval India. Mind–body substance dualism became a central topic in early modern Western philosophy following the works of René Descartes. It was largely replaced by materialist monism in the course of the 20th century as the dominant stance toward the mind–body problem.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:47 UTC on Saturday, 29 August 2026.
For the full current version of the article, see Dualism on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm standard Geraint.
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