More had already begun to familiarise himself with Neoplatonic philosophy during his undergraduate years, and began to develop his own dualistic ideas, emphasising the immateriality of the soul, in philosophical poems approximating to the mode of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen (1590), which he wrote in 1639 and 1640.
Tiantai takes the non-dualistic ideas suggested by the Lotus Sutra in fables and unexplained narrative hints, and adapts the resources of Emptiness and the Two Truths to give them a full philosophical explanation and practical application for Buddhist practice.
An uncompromising dualist, he traced back dualistic thought even to some of the Upanishads.
And a more recent history of the movement concludes that Thoreau had little in common with this group of thinkers, who were for the most part committed to some version of Christianity, to a dualistic understanding of mind and matter, and to the related idea that sense experience is unreliable (Boller 1974 , 29 35& 176).
"... it comes naturally to the simple man of today to think of a dualistic relationship between mind and matter as an extremely obvious idea...
Indeed, as Erwin Schrödinger, a principal founder of quantum mechanics, remarked; "It comes naturally for the simple man of today to think of a dualistic relationship between mind and matter as an extremely obvious idea...
This notion of a physical sign was supported and reinforced by the early modern idea of a dualistic body, a major symbolic opposition in Western medicine from its first formulation in the ancient Greek Hippocratic treatises.
This would lead Benjamin to attempt a radical rethinking of the philosophical concept of the Idea, away from its dualistic associations with a timeless and purely rational essence of things.
While modern science has uncovered voluminous evidence against this idea, Cobb argues that dualistic assumptions continue to persist: "On the whole, dualism was accepted by the general culture.
The various dualistic theories of the mind treat the interaction problem in different ways.
