Leibniz's Metaphysics Research Articles

Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development

Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development

Incomplete Entities, Natural Non-separability, and Leibniz’s Response to François Lamy’s De la Conoissance de soi-même

Robert M. Adams claims that Leibniz's rehahilitation of the doctrine of incomplete entities is the most sustained etlort to integrate a theory of corporeal substances into the theory of simple substances. I discuss alternative interpretations of the theory of incomplete entities suggested by Marleen Rozemond and Pauline Phemister. Against Rozemond, I argue that the scholastic doctrine of incomplete entities is not dependent on a hylnmorphic analysis of corporeal suhstances, and therefore can be adapted by Leibniz. Against Phemister, I claim that Leibniz did not reduce the passivity of corporeal substances to modifications of passive aspects of simple substances. Against Adams, I argue that Leibniz's theory of the incompleteness of the mind cannot be understood adequately without understanding the reasons for his assertion that matter is incomplete without minds. Composite substances are seen as requisites for the reality of the material world, and therefore cannot be eliminated from Leibniz's metaphysics. P or Leibniz, a simple substance such as a soul or a mind is a being in the sense that it is the origin of its own actions, and that it represents in a confused way all its previous states.] Indeed, what could be more complete than a simple substance with its causal independence and autonomy in the production of its own states'! Nevel1heless, in the Addition a l' Explication du systeme nouveau (1698), written as a response to an extended review of the first edition of Fran~ois Lamy's De la C0l10iSSallce de soi-mcme, Leibniz embraces the Scholastic view that soul and body, in some sense, are incomplete entities. 3 Although the passages in which Leibniz takes up this thought in subsequent years are not very numerous, Robet1 M. Adams has suggested that it most fully expresses Leibniz's attempt to integrate a Scholastic theory of corporeal substance into his philosophy.4 Marleen Rozemond and Pauline Phemister have proposed interpretations that diverge markedly from Adams'. Rozemond objtcts that Leibniz cannot reproduce basic features of the Scholastic view within the framework of his own metaphysics. According to her interpretation, it is essential for the Scholastic theory that mind and body are related to each other as matter and form, which supplement each other as act and potency - a structure that the relations of mutual representation

Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (review)

Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (review)

Reply to Cees Leijenhorst’s Review of Leibniz’s Metaphysics

I n his thoughtful and generous review of my book, Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, Cees Leijenhorst accepts many of its most radical conclusions: that Leibniz's metaphysics evolved out of an attempt to combine ideas gathered from the great philosophers of the past and to do so in a manner that would solve the theological, legal, and philosophical questions that most concerned him; that although Leibniz's notion of substance developed out of his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle, his conception of the relation between God and creatures (and therefore his account of universal harmony) has its roots in the Platonism that he learned as a young man in Leipzig and Jena; that the views constituting the core doctrines of the mature philosophy (including a version of preestablished harmony) were conceived by the time Leibniz went to Paris in early 1672; and that Leibniz rejects the reality of passive extended matter and embraces his own version of idealism as early as 1671. I am tempted to respond with a loud rodeo yell and end it at that. But because the few points on which Leijenhorst and I disagree (however slightly) concern some of the most severe problems that face the early modern historian, I am eager to take the opportunity to discuss these problems here. A major part of Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development is given over to the Platonist and Aristotelian assumptions that Leibniz learned as a young man and then used as the raw materials for his philosophy. I was motivated to distinguish between Aristotelianism and Platonism in the way that I did because Leibniz and his teachers did. But any such distinction is problematic. Appropriately, Leijenhorst worries about the fact that Mercer's book appears to use the labels 'Platonism' and 'Aristotelianism' in a rather essentialist way. To distinguish between Aristotelianism and Platonism, especially in the early modern period, is problematic in several ways. Already in late antiquity, followers of Plato and Aristotle assumed that these philosophies were in fundamental agreement. Important commentators like Porphyry (c.232-c.306) proposed a Platonism that was thoroughly mixed with Aristotelianism. This sort of Aristotelianized Platonism formed the intellectual background to medieval Europe, and informed the theological and doctrinal commitments of the early Christian church. When Renaissance and early modern thinkers turn to Augustine, they are

Continuity in Leibniz's Mature Metaphysics

Continuity in Leibniz's Mature Metaphysics

Leibniz on Mathematics and the Actually Infinite Division of Matter

Yet if it can hardly be denied that Leibniz is one of those philosophers who join metaphysics to mathematics, still, very little attention has actually been paid to the union of those two disciplines in his philosophy. Most recent trends in the study of Leibniz's metaphysics are finding it to be dominated by a theory of broadly logical concepts, or a philosophy of mind and action, or a theology, in which his mathematics plays at best only an incidental role.2 But to miscast mathematics in that way is to misunderstand

Catherine Wilson on Leibniz's Metaphysics

Anyone preparing to work through Catherine Wilson's important 1989 book, Leibniz's Metaphysics, would be well advised to go back for another look at Bertrand Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, for it is this book that provides the foil and the context for much that Wilson has to say. In particular, the preface to Russell's first edition stresses the very points regarding both methodology and content on which Wilson will disagree most vigorously with her predecessor.

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study.

The description for this book, Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, will be forthcoming.

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study (review)

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study (review)

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study.

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study.

Leibniz 's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study by Catherine Wilson and Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentaryon their Correspondence by Robert C. Sleigh, Jr.

Leibniz 's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study by Catherine Wilson and Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentaryon their Correspondence by Robert C. Sleigh, Jr.

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study

Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study. Catherine Wilson

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsLeibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study. Catherine Wilson Roger AriewRoger Ariew Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 82, Number 2Jun., 1991 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/355787 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1991 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Spontaneity and the Generation of Rational Beings in Leibniz's Theory of Biological Reproduction

Spontaneity and the Generation of Rational Beings in Leibniz's Theory of Biological Reproduction DANIEL C. FOUKE IN 1712 Leibniz reiterated what had become one of the central principles of his metaphysics after the mid-168os: "It is the nature of a created substance to change continually according to a certain order which spontaneously leads it... through all its states in such a way that one who is omniscient sees all its past and future states in its present state" (GP 4: 518) 9Leibniz attributed no little explanatory power to this doctrine of spontaneity (e.g., GP 4: 48o-87, 52o-~ 4, 554-7x), and it might be expected that in a world in which everything is composed of spontaneously developing beings which "have something vital and a species of perception" (GP 4: 482-83), where biology is in a sense at the root of everything, it would be easier to explain the biological reproduction of humans than in the alternative worlds conceived by Leibniz's philosophical contemporaries. The explanation most consonant with Leibniz's metaphysics would seem to be that it is divinely pre-established that at the moment of biological conception the organism which pre-exists in either the sperm or egg of the parents begins a spontaneous development into a mature human with a rational soul. It might be expected that this development, like all developments in the Leibnizian world, is produced by the individual nature from its previous states, so that what was previously nonrational now becomes rational by its own power. Yet Leibniz is reluctant to adopt such a view, and frequently entertains explanations which seem contrary to the demands of his own metaMythanks to Don Rutherford, Dan Garber, and the editor and referees of the Journal of the HistoryofPhilosophyfor their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. [33] 34 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~9:1 JANUARY 1991 physics. This paradox requires explanation, suggesting that there is more to Leibniz's system than standard expositions indicate. l. SPONTANEITY AND THE NATURAL ORDER The doctrine of spontaneity is closely connected to Leibniz's conviction that the natural order must reflect the metaphysical perfection of God. The context in which Leibniz introduces metaphysical perfection implies that the concept is intended to express the perfection of God as manifested in his creative acts. In the Discoursde m~taphysiqueLeibniz applies the concept with particular emphasis on the manner in which God's creative wisdom is to be conceived as a balance between means and ends. This balance is to be interpreted as the production of maximum variety by means of the simplest system of laws consistent with that variety. Leibniz expresses this concept through a number of analogies: the "excellent geometer who knows how to find the best contructions of a problem," the "good architect who manages his resources in order to build in the best fashion," the builder who balances his expenses "with the grandeur and beauty required." "It is true that God has no costs... since God can bring a real world into existence by mere decrees. But when the issue is wisdom, decrees or hypotheses count as expenses in proportion as they are more independent of one another, for reason desires to avoid a multiplicity of hypotheses or principles somewhat as the simplest system is always preferred in astronomy" (DM 4~ [sect. 5]). The notion of metaphysical perfection is primary for Leibniz and provides a criterion by which to judge metaphysical systems. But how to apply the criterion is less than transparent. The requirement of maximum variety consistent with greatest order appears to be absolute: God must create a world in which "all the orders of natural beings form but a single chain, in which the various classes, like so many rings, are so closely linked one to another that it is impossible for the senses or the imagination to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins."' However, maximal variety produced by simple means would not be an adequate manifestation of God's perfect wisdom unless it were realized in the particular form of an intelligible self-contained system. This interpretation of metaphysical perfection motivates Leibniz's criticisms...

Leibniz (review)

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...

"Leibniz's Metaphysics of Nature," by Nicholas Rescher; "Space and Incongruence: The Origin of Kant's Idealism," by Jill Vance Buroker; "Practice and Realization: Studies in Kant's Moral Philosophy," by Nathan Rotenstreich; "The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant's Philosophy and Politics," by Susan Meld Shell; "Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement," edited by Michael Fox

"Leibniz's Metaphysics of Nature," by Nicholas Rescher; "Space and Incongruence: The Origin of Kant's Idealism," by Jill Vance Buroker; "Practice and Realization: Studies in Kant's Moral Philosophy," by Nathan Rotenstreich; "The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant's Philosophy and Politics," by Susan Meld Shell; "Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement," edited by Michael Fox

Leibniz: An Introduction (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 105 14) The happy conclusion, except for the case of the martyr, is that Hobbes saves piety, but not theology, and he provides for the integrity of scientific knowledge. Describing Hobbes's philosophy as "'a-theistic," Johnson summarizes: Hobbes "sharply separated faith from reason and isolated piety from theology. Such a view let him completely free to construct a metaphysics , a psychology, and a politics in which the idea of God played no functional role and in which the traditional religious issues could be subjected to the severest criticism and finally left in the hands of the ruler" (p. 124). Johnson reveals the momentous achievement of Hobbes's capacity to deal with the divine as well as with the secular aspects of experience, even if there are passages in his writings that cause intellectual discomfort from both sides. There is such a question as that of false prophets, which requires a covenant before truth can be revealed (e.g., Lev., iii, 402). There is the further question of the proof of God's existence from his power (Lev., iii, 345-346, and passim), even if it does not reveal, as Fulton Anderson points out in the parallel in Bacon's thought that "the objects given to sense manifest the power of God but not his will and essential nature (The philosophy of Francis Bacon, p. 54). Also, as we have before noted, the questions of peace and its workings are beclouded by obligations sometimes said to be of divine origin. sometimes not. Perhaps some of these questions can be answered by a closer understanding of what Schneider felicitously calls "the civilizing arts." Thomas llobbes in Ills Time is a fine and illuminatingwork that deserves close reading for a fresh and needed reinterpretation of Hobbes. One may, however, also discern from this work that, placed in historical perspective, Hobbes's philosophical, but less pious, successors are Jeremy Bentham, and, in a humanistic sense, John Dewey. BERTRAM MORRIS UniversiO' of Colorado Leibniz: An Introduction. By C. D. Broad. Ed. by C. Lewy. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. xi+174. 514.95 cloth. $4.95 paper.I Assessing this work presents the reviewer with some special problems. (11 The volume contains Broad's Cambridge undergraduate lectures on the philosophy of Leibniz which were delivered initiallyin 1948-1949 and again the following year revised. Thus at least a quarter of a century elapsed between the preparation of the lectures and the present publication. (2) Because this material was not specially prepared by Broad for publication, it has retained some features more appropriate to a lecture than to a published work, e.g., the style, the recapitulation of the point at issue, and the lack of detailed references. (3) The editor has tried to provide references to currently available English translations where possible, but since Broad himself usually gave no page citations and sometimes offered only a paraphrase of the actual text, it has been a formidable task, and one can only hope that all the references are accurate. (4) Since Professor Broad is dead, he cannot respond to such comments upon his work as may be inaccurate or unfair. The title is far too encompassing for the scope of the work. It is not a wide-ranging introduction to the multifaceted life and thought of Leibniz. Only brief mention is made of Leibniz's contributions in such areas as mathematics, science, technology, political and legal theory. history and linguistics. At most this can be thought of as an introduction to Leibniz's philosophy , but even here there are major omissions in Leibniz's logic and a quite brief treatment of his ethics. Of course, H. W. B. Joseph had preempted the title Lectures on the Philosoph.v of Leibniz. But Lewy might have entitled the volume C. D. Broad's Lectures on Leibniz 's Metaphysics and Epistemology and thereby more accurately conveyed the major thrust of the work, because Leibniz's ethics receives comparatively little attention and almost all of his theology can be reasonably subsumed under his metaphysics. Broad himself treats the controversy over transubstantiation and the doctrine of the vinculum substantiale under the theory of monads. The text...

A Leibnizian Space

Leibniz said that space and time are well-founded phenomena. Few readers can make much literal sense out of this idea, so I shall describe a small possible world in which it is true. I do not contend that Leibniz had my construction in mind, but I do follow Leibnizian guidelines. The first trick is to reverse the maxim that every monad mirrors the world from its own point of view. Points of view, and hence a space of points, can be constructed from a non-relational account of the perceptions of each monad. But we cannot fabricate space alone. We must build up laws of nature simultaneously. We must also employ a measure of the simplicity of the laws of nature. Moreover we require that, in a literal sense, the perception of each monad is a sum of its Petits perceptions. The identity of indiscernibles, in its application to space, is an automatic consequence of this construction. Although I shall examine only one possible world, there is a general recipe for such constructions, in which none of the above elements can be omitted. This is a striking illustration of the way in which the many different facets of Leibniz's metaphysics are necessarily inter-connected.

Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (review)

Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (review)

Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics. By G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford, The Clarendon Press1965, pp. x, 196. $5.95. - Leibniz, Logical Papers. A Selection. Translated and Edited with an Introduction by G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford, The Clarendon Press pp. lxv, 148. $5.95.

Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics. By G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford, The Clarendon Press1965, pp. x, 196. $5.95. - Leibniz, Logical Papers. A Selection. Translated and Edited with an Introduction by G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford, The Clarendon Press pp. lxv, 148. $5.95.