Over the centuries many philosophers have seen a fundamental dualism. Most have invented their own names for this dualism. Not all have meant the very same things, but the great similarities allow us to collect all these dualisms into a chronological table, where similarities and slight differences become more clear.
Of course many have claimed to be monists. "All is One," they said, as they generally reduced the physical world to the ideal, or vice versa, or argued that the ideal and physical worlds were somehow both something else. But their underlying dualism was inescapable.
Many philosophers saw the need for the two sides to work together.
Immanuel Kant wrote
Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer.
Anschaungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.
Charles Sanders Peirce rewrote it as
If Materialism without Idealism is blind,
Idealism without Materialism is void.
With a nod to Kant and Peirce, we can say
Concepts without Percepts are empty.
Percepts without Concepts are blind.
And although Freedom and Values are not a Dualism, they too require one another and we can observe
Freedom without Values is Absurd (Existentialism).
Values without Freedom are Worthless (Positivism).
In Information Philosophy, we divide the world into three fundamental parts, the physical, the ideal (ideas are the same kind of abstraction as pure information), and the biological/human, a middle world of both ideality and physicality.
Information Philosophy thus offers a new solution to the
Mind-Body Problem.
