Leibniz (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 129 than it need be. In the end one must agree with the author's own assessment: that Locke's moral theory, consistent or otherwise, is not of great significance in the history of philosophy. CAROLE STEWART University of Guelph Stuart Brown. Leibniz. Philosophers in Context. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, t984. Pp. xii + ~23. Cloth, $35.00. Paper, $1~.95. Until recently, litde attention was paid to Leibniz's philosophical development. For many years, the center of scholarly interest was the Russell-Couturat thesis that Leibniz derived his metaphysics from his logic. The merits of this remarkable thesis tended to be debated with only passing glances at the chronology of Leibniz's writings . It was widely assumed that Leibniz's philosophical maturity dated from the Discourse on Metaphysics of ~686, and that subsequent years saw no major changes in his system. Few philosophers accepted the Russell-Couturat thesis without qualification , but it had obvious attractions as a focus of a general survey: it allowed Leibniz's philosophy to be presented as a coherent and intelligible system. Stuart Brown is one of a number of scholars who are dissatisfied with this approach ; he rightly believes that chronology is ignored at the price of serious distortion . In this book he has had the interesting idea of writing an introductory study around a diachronic approach to the huge corpus of Leibniz's writings. His book bears clear witness to the fact that Leibniz's metaphysics underwent some rather serious modifications in the thirty remaining years of his life after the Discourse of 1686. In particular, Brown is well aware that there is a major difference between the quasi-Aristotelian theory of substance in that work and the idealist or panpsychist doctrines of the later writings. As Brown shows well, there are striking points of similarity between the later Leibniz and his junior contemporary, Berkeley. Brown's book thus allows readers approaching Leibniz for the first time to get a taste of recent developments in the field. But although Brown's project is an interesting one, its execution is not fully satisfactory . Since Brown is writing an introductory study, he feels the need to do justice to something like the full range of Leibniz's themes and interests, and this requirement is not easily combined with the diachronic approach. Brown is sometimes led to skimp his explanations of Leibnizian ideas, and it is often difficult for the reader to see how central doctrines hang together. Brown tends to be weak where traditional commentators are strong. Thus he does not really spell out the undeniable logical connections between the inesse(or 'predicate-in-notion') principle, the complete concept theory, and the doctrine that every individual substance expresses the whole universe according to its point of view. Again, Brown refers to the principle of sufficient reason on a number of occasions, but he fails to bring out its Protean quality in Leibniz's writings. All too often the need to cover a lot of themadc ground leads to abrupt and confusing transitions from one topic to another. And Brown does not stick consistently to the chronological framework he 13o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:1 JANUARY 1986 has set for himself; in the chapter entitled 'Youthful Scholasticism' a number of the quotations actually come from much later writings. Perhaps after all the diachronic approach is not well-suited to introducing a philosopher whose range of themes and interests is as broad as Leibniz's. Apart from its stress on Leibniz's development, a further distinctive feature of the book is the space it devotes to metaphilosophical issues. Like other recent writers (Loeb, for example), Brown deplores the textbook division of seventeenth-century philosophers into the warring schools of Rationalism and Empiricism. Brown is on strong ground here; this habit of thought is so deeply entrenched that there is no harm in attacking it once again. But Brown is less convincing when he attempts to drive a metaphilosophical wedge between Leibniz and the other 'Rationalists' socalled . He claims that Leibniz's method "even in metaphysics, is much closer to what is nowadays called the hypothetico-deductive method than to that characteristic of...