The aim of the project is to clarify ways the body has been understood in philosophy and to discuss its relevance to physiotherapy. What became most obvious to Descartes, was that man is a thinker, and that matter must be created by God according to physical laws.
Man therefore has two different substances interacting with each other.
How two such substances interact is an unsolved logical problem in Descartes' philosophy. Notwithstanding, Descartes philosophy has had a great impact on our perception of the body since 16 century. Philosophers within the phenomenological tradition, have in our century criticized Descates' dualistic philosophy. The perceiver is not a pure thinker, but a body-subject, and any act of reflection is based on that pre personal incarnate subjectivity. Reflection and theories are understood as secondary orders in the life-world, like the relation between the landscape and its maps.