Abstract
Current intellectual wisdom, abetted by philosophers of all stripes, teaches that the Cartesian philosophy is both wrong and dead. This wisdom will be overtaken by events. Present and future technologies – ranging from organ transplants to information coding – will increasingly make us revert to Descartes's picture of two absolutely distinct types of domains, the mental and the physical, which nevertheless constantly interact. We as humans are constituted in both domains, and also must inhabit them. This is less a matter of facts – for what a person is, is never simply a matter of fact – than of how we will come to conceive of ourselves in the light of the facts that will press in upon us.
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