Leibniz and Newton on Space, Time and the Trinity

Abstract

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was born in 1646 just before the end of the Thirty Years War and who died 1716, is surely one of the most bizarre and interesting of the early modern philosophers. He was an astonishing polymath, and responsible for some of the most advanced work in the sciences of his day--he was, for instance, the co-inventor along with Newton, of differential calculus, and is generally recognized as the greatest logician of the early modern period, responsible for advances in logic not rivaled until the mid-nineteenth century. But this progressive aspect of Leibniz's thought is paired by one that was more backward looking, deeply engaged with pre-modern forms of thinking that referred back through Medieval culture to the philosophy of ancient times. And alongside of his scientific advances, he is known for having created one of the most baroque and puzzling metaphysical systems in the history of philosophy--the so-called Monadology. For much of his life he was also absorbed in theological disputes that have now been long been forgotten, and generally thought of as alien to modern scientific modes of thought. But it is easy to fall into anachronistic assumptions here. First, historians of the early modern period point to the degree that scientific and theological issues were virtually inseparable during much of this period. Even in the case of Newton, it would seem, he was forced to trade in ideas of very questionable provenance in order to come up with his revolutionary achievements in natural science. But if we further concentrate not on the development within formal or empirical sciences but on questions of a distinctly philosophical nature, Leibniz seems to further complicate assumptions about the unidirectional nature of intellectual progress. While many of his contemporaries saw progress as involving a break with the past, and especially the Aristotelianism that came from the scholastic period, Leibniz did not see the task as one of breaking with ancient philosophical thought, but as integrating it with modern scientific advances. Today I would like to attempt to bring some of the ways in which Leibniz's scientific, philosophical and theological views were bound up with each other by briefly examining his roles within two apparently different disputes in the late 17th and early 18th centuries: first his dispute with Newton over the nature of space and time; and next his dispute with the Socinian followers of Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), (a religious movement that later came to be called Unitarianism), over the doctrine of the trinity. (1) These may seem to be unrelated, but they might be connected in interesting ways. First, Leibniz's dispute with Newton over space and time had, as we will see, overtly theological aspects. Furthermore, as we now know, Newton had himself been a secret critic of the doctrine of the Trinity. (2) We might then wonder if there is a relation between Leibniz's attitude to Newton on the issue of space and time on the one hand, and his relation to the Socinians on the trinity, on the other. I'll suggest that indeed there could be a relation there, and that the connection has to do with rival conceptions of the mind and its operations implicit in both disputes. Leibniz's critique of a certain conception of God common to Newton and the Socinians signaled a challenge to the prevailing conceptions of divine mindedness, and as humans were, after all, conceived as made in God's likeness, changes in conceptions of the divine mind were going to be reflected in conceptions of the human. But it was a backward--looking challenge that appealed to older conceptions. Despite this, I believe, we can see within Leibniz's thought anticipations of some later, more progressive accounts of the mind as found in post-Kantian idealists like Fichte and Hegel. These accounts were to take the approach to human mindedness beyond standardly immaterialist and materialist alternatives of the early modern era. …