Actually, I am a dualist. I just don't discount matter because it isn't form. Gnosticism is the place to shop for that particular error.

This is all tangential to the original post, which is much more interesting.

I don't know (I do, really; it's is just an idiom) how the "ghost in the machine" type of dualism achieved such prominence. It's easily refuted, silly, and egregiously wrong. But I, at least, am a dualist, so far as I understand the stance. I believe in matter, and form.

This belief makes my life easier in lots of ways. For example, I can say that a waterfall, or a river, or a person, is always the same waterfall or river or person, without having to worry about them changing, or even whether they possess any of the same bits of matter as they did when I last dealt with them. I assume that they each possess substance, to which various accidents happen, and that that substance has an eternal form. And while I believe that the form continues even after the matter passes away, I don't believe that the soul is complete without a body. Heaven is not populated with ghosts, and the angels are not airy beings, whatever Milton may have thought.

On a very slightly related point, I've seen E Prime suggested as a cure for semantic confusion. To me, the cure seems worse than the disease. While it's nice, every now and then, to be reminded that existence is not a predicate, simply removing the verb "to be" does not advance the argument. Some things are, even in the limited sense the gentleman argues against: they are permanent, unchanging, and always true. Two plus two is four; God is love; the Twins are the greatest team to root for in the history of baseball. Two a priori synthetics and one a posteriori.

Also, and I apologize if this is too flippant, since I do find iconoclasm an abhorrent heresy:

The ICONOCLASTS go smashing
With hammer, pick, and iron bar,
The genitals that bronze is flashing,
Heedless of what art they mar.