Abstract

One well-known argument for the view that a person isn’t identical with his body is commonly attributed to Descartes. In brief, the argument is: ‘I can doubt that my body exists; I can’t doubt that I exist; so I am not my body.’ No one thinks that the argument is sound --- not even Descartes after he closely examined it. In this paper, I reconstruct the argument, explain and criticize various objections to it , and identify and defend what I take to be the real problem with it. Contrary to popular opinion, the real problem has nothing to do with Leibniz’s Law