Jeffrey McDonough

In this essay, we explore a fresh avenue into mind-body dualism by considering a seemingly distant question posed by Frege: "Why is it absurd to suppose that Julius Caesar is a number?". The essay falls into three main parts. In the first, through an exploration of Frege’s Julius Caesar problem, we attempt to expose two maxims applicable to the mind-body problem. In the second part, we draw on those maxims in arguing that “full blown dualism” is preferable to more modest, property-theoretic, versions. Finally, in the third part we close by suggesting that full blown dualism need not be spooky, resurrecting a broadly Lockean, rather than Cartesian, metaphysical picture.

Daniel Garber’s Leibniz: Body, Substance and Monad . When I first entered graduate school Dan’s previous book Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics had recently appeared, and it made a huge and lasting impression on me. All of a sudden I saw Descartes’s project in a much different, more intriguing light. This Garber fella had managed to open up a new area of Descartes’s thought to me, to tease out with great care his philosophical arguments, and to situate both in a broader historical context in which they seemed to me at least much more at home. In short, Dan’s Descartes’s book is one of the main reasons why I work on Leibniz. And now we have his rich, learned, and provocative book on Leibniz to wrestle with. I am certain that it will similarly inspire another generation of early modern scholars as well – hopefully they won’t all be moved to work on Kant!