ABSTRACT
Joanna Leidenhag’s proposal for panpsychist traducianism requires her reader to agree that, among other things, souls are a (the?) fundamental building block of created reality, that souls can be combined to form other higher-level souls, and that all souls—both the micro and the macro (let’s call them)—are conscious. 87 They have inner phenomenal experiences of one degree or another. For this proposal, I have two major concerns that I shall cover briefly in this response. The first is a counting problem given that identity entails individuality. A basic law of logic, after all, is the law of identity: every individual thing is identical to itself and no other thing. Another way to put it is this: identity goes in one direction, not many. Leidenhag’s account, in my view, violates this basic law of logic. The second problem is this: there’s no clear difference between the physical and the mental. Leidenhag supposes that all things are “psychophysical.” But, on my reading, it seems to me that her view reduces to everything is psychical. 88 I’ll say more about this second worry in the second section.
