Reply to Stefano Di Bella

Abstract

am most grateful to Stefano Di Bella for his very perceptive reading of my book. Di Bella's review is not only accurate and balanced but also captures some of the non-written thoughts and hesitations of its author. His critical remarks and his call for further attention to some of Leibniz's texts are well taken. I especially appreciate the critical spirit of his review for the point of publication can only be to subject one's work to careful examination. One can only hope to be read and criticized by careful and competent reviewer as Di Bella. Di Bella's review calls for some clarifications, which I shall attempt below. His review also made me see something that I didn't see as clearly in writing the book, and hence have not expressed as clearly as I should have. This point concerns Di Bella's outline of my project as a combinatorial reconstruction of the world. Di Bella describes my project in these words: The construction of world out of the material of simple concepts (or 'forms') is usually taken by interpreters as little more than program (if not dream), whose realization has proven to be far from linear one. Nachtomy's book, on the contrary, tries to take the idea seriously; it outlines, indeed, complete reconstruction of Leibniz's metaphysics from the bottom up - 'synthetically', we might say - i.e. from the material of possibilia in God's mind up to individual concepts/substances and further on to the world of bodies. Nachtomy is well aware of the different ontological levels and the crucial steps (if not gaps) one comes across when moving from one to another. He engages himself, however, in basically continuistic interpretation, providing rationale for all controversial steps (underline is mine). Most of this description is right on. I do have some slight reservations about some points of detail. But there is one central point that I'd like to bring out in this reply. My account is indeed continuous (and even bottom-up) in that it attempts to trace the construction of all possible individuals and worlds in God's mind from basic elements. It proceeds to describe how possible things are actualized and how the divine mental construction of possible things in God's mind bears on their realization as the individual substances that make up the actual world (and it bears great deal, I think). At the same time, my account points - or at least should have done so more clearly - to major point of discontinuity or, better, rupture. I