Brandon Look’s introduction to this long-awaited collection points to the range of Leibniz’s writings unknown to Kant and his contemporaries and to Kant’s general dislike of historical scholarship. Kant apparently owned not a single book authored by Leibniz, or for that matter by Spinoza or Locke, and only one volume of Christian Wolff, his Ontologia. Yet the name index of the Kant corpus renders Leibniz, Wolff, along with Newton as the most frequently cited authors.One might well imagine that, from Kant’s perspective, Leibniz was the overestimated author of a mannered, fanciful, and generally incredible system, featuring ingeniously wrought monads and meticulous divine planning, a system that addressed no one’s serious concerns about moral good and evil, human agency, or providence and the future. Reciprocally, if Leibniz had happened on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, having been out of touch for sixty-five years, he would likely have dismissed it as a poorly constructed and indecisive work that proved nothing. Had they had the patience for a conversation, the two would have agreed on a few things: that corporeal atoms cannot constitute the ultimate units of reality, that the mechanical philosophy—and even Newton’s version of it—nevertheless gives good predictions, and that there is life on other planets. But to stop with these reflections would not do justice to the importance of Leibniz as an opponent for Kant and even as, in some respects, a positive influence. As Robert Butts (1986: 6) observed, “Like Leibniz, [Kant] wanted a system that enshrined the mechanical method as the method of science; he also wanted an account that would save teleology, purposiveness, meaningfulness.” Leibniz’s “double government” of reason and necessity mutated into Kant’s double world of purposive actions and mere happenings and into the dualism of his ideal moral community versus the ambition-fueled rough-and-tumble of historical states and doings.A highlight of the book is Ursula Goldenbaum’s insight- and information-packed opening essay on German intellectual culture leading up to Kant. Goldenbaum takes us through the threat to Christianity posed by Leibniz’s theory of the preestablished harmony between soul and body and the Pietist opposition to it, and to the theologians’ rejection of such basic principles as inertia, the conservation of force, and mechanism on the grounds that it was up to God what happened in physics. Despite his not very successful efforts to be current with and contribute to eighteenth-century mathematical physics, Kant’s strenuous commitment to free will and his relegation of mechanism to the appearances reflect his Pietist background. Eric Watkins discusses in further detail Kant’s s explorations of the concepts of essence and existence in his Nova Dilucidatio of 1755 and his The Only Possible Argument for the Existence of God of 1763, and his alignment with the Pietist philosopher Christian August Crusius against Leibniz-Wolff determinism. Although Watkins’s description of Kant as breaking with rationalism thereafter is understandable, one might suggest that Kant’s break is more precisely described as a new refusal to discuss traditional philosophical problems in an analytical way independent of human interests.Most chapters engage with Kant more substantially than with Leibniz, though Donald Rutherford, in an essay principally devoted to interpreting Leibniz’s theory of space, summarizes Kant’s understanding and misunderstanding of Leibniz’s use of the identity of indiscernibles and his account of the relationship between perception and cognition. Controversially, because Newtonian space would seem equally a priori, and because Kant thought he had laid waste to Leibnizian space-theory through the consideration of incongruent counterparts, Rutherford concludes that Leibniz and Kant share the “assumption of space as ideal and the a priori form of outer perception” (111). Leibniz’s interesting claim that “similars” can only be distinguished when coperceived (cited on p. 98) might have made a good starting point for a defense of Rutherford’s thesis. Alison Laywine poses a novel and interesting question: What, in the view of Leibniz and Kant, does God need to do to create a world? In the critical philosophy, where origin stories are off limits, the “world” comes to mean for Kant “not created substances that owe their existence to God … [but] parts that we represent by perceptions.” The “world” for us is the part of God’s transcendental knowledge that we can “rationally reconstruct by interpreting our perceptions as connected by laws” (132–33). This is illuminating: Hume’s possible scenarios of random happenings are accordingly not images of a “world” at all.Nicholas Stang argues that Leibniz at least attempted to think through how monads project into a world of empirical objects, or into our individual experiences, producing various accounts, none of which was satisfactory, while Kant was entitled as a critical philosopher wisely to declare the noumenon-phenomenon relationship unknowable in principle. Anja Jauernig returns to Kant’s accusation that Leibniz confused cognition with perception. Where did Kant get that from, and what was he driving at? Probably via Wolff and Baumgarten, from Leibniz’s famous assignment of only two basic faculties to the soul: perception and appetition and the teachings on confused perception of the “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas.”Apparently, Kant realized only in the controversy with Eberhard that Leibniz never made the drastically confused claim that we perceive monads-as-unextended-primary-substances through the ordinary mechanisms of visual perception. Martha Brandt Bolton discusses the perception-cognition issue and the monads-matter relationship in her chapter on the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection, pointing to Kant’s “apparent lack of information about what his predecessor actually holds,” and amplifies Goldenbaum’s observation that Kant’s grasp of formal mechanics is tenuous. Paul Guyer examines Kant’s late-in-life recognition of a substantially different Leibniz who, rather than confusing cognition and perception, proposed an unknowable substrate for the experienced world. Leibniz’s contrast between the “realm of grace” and the “realm of nature” are echoed in Kant’s contrast between the intelligible world, the moral community, and the empirical world of science and the everyday. Guyer contrasts Kantian teleology as a regulative principle with Leibniz’s constitutive parallelism, whereby the mechanical order tends through divine planning to maturation, various forms of fulfillment, and deserved reward and punishment. Desmond Hogan analyzes Kant’s theory of divine and secondary causation, implicitly disagreeing with Goldenbaum in characterizing the early Kant as a necessitarian undergoing a conversion to free will but he ascribes to Kant a “mature theory of God’s relation to creaturely causality.” According to Hogan, “His libertarian theory of freedom is never presented as justifying a deistic dilution of creaturely dependence” (294). While Kant had reason to avoid presenting his account of free will as contradicting a fundamental theological principle, it is hard to see the mature Kant as endorsing any determinate position about God’s agency. Patrick Kain’s study of the divine will shows us how Kant as critical philosopher nevertheless regards the “holy will” as a concept good to think with and how the ascription of a possible good moral will to human beings benefits from the example of the alleged intelligibility of God’s moral will. Andrew Chignell’s lively and clearly written essay takes us through Leibniz’s various attempts to preserve the doctrine of the world as perfect clockwork with the need to avoid contradicting scripture and reputable theology on miracles and argues that Kant employs the possibility of our “breaking the laws of nature” in free will. This raises the question whether Kant means this possibility seriously (in which case he is not a compatibilist, contrary to his claim that the actions of the criminal are in principle determined and predictable but at the same time free), or whether lawbreaking agency is only a concept good to think with.The collection is focused on metaphysics, specifically on phenomenalism and idealism, causality, divinity, and space and time. It is, as Herder said of Kant’s First Critique, a “hard chew.” I suspect most readers will direct their attention to topics of their individual interest rather than attempting to read through the book as a whole. A number of interesting points of Leibniz-Kant comparison are not addressed in the volume, or not with the same thoroughness, notably the problems of evil and human wrongdoing, the appeals of both Leibniz and Kant to Plato and Aristotle, their objections to Locke, their conceptions of selfhood and identity, their different structures of argumentation, and their views on the relationship of mathematics to philosophy.The narrow focus is somewhat regrettable, as the individual essays are very long, running to about thirty pages each. The temptation with such generous allowances is for authors to go round and round with the topic, even when a substantial literature on it already exists, or when readers would benefit from a more efficient survey. While it is admittedly difficult to balance thorough research and responsible citation with reader-friendliness, avoiding condescension and oversimplification, I often felt a chapter could have been sharply reduced in length with no loss to its intellectual content and much greater usefulness, including to our graduate students.Additionally, I would have appreciated a greater sensitivity in some chapters to issues of chronology and audience. While we no longer take a precritical and a critical Kant for granted, it is helpful to distinguish between at least three groups of writings: the varied pre-1770 books and essays where Kant was trying to find his professional footing and experimenting with popular philosophy while practicing more academic forms of analysis; the Lectures on Metaphysics of the 1760s to 1790s, which Kant was paid to deliver to teenage students in a university dominated by the theological faculty; and the critical philosophy, written for Kant’s peers with the intent to reform philosophy from the ground up. So Kant considered it his responsibility in his lectures to present the traditional metaphysical positions and controversies regarding God, the soul, and the world, deftly adding in some of his own doubts and opinions. University teaching was “private,” in Kant’s view, and so constrained by the wishes of the employer; book publication was “public” and, for pushing his qualified readers out of the immaturity he attributes to the “overwhelming majority of mankind” in the essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” the more challenging, the better. While the commentator has every right to explore the fine points of Kant’s more scholastic discussions of, for example, the extent of divine agency, it is helpful to point out that he was not invested in the outcome of debates on these topics, and that the thrust of the critical philosophy is to their avoidance.
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