Julia Jorati

Leibniz was obsessed with freedom. He turns to this topic again and again throughout his long career. And what he has to say about freedom is much more resourceful and inventive than typically acknowledged. While building on medieval theories—for instance by describing freedom in terms of the relation between the agent’s will and intellect—he also adds radically new elements and even anticipates some views that are popular today. The combination of theses about free will that Leibniz endorses in his mature writings is unusual and may at first appear inconsistent: (a) he claims that some of our actions are free, (b) he links free agency closely to agent causation and in fact appears to deny that there is event causation; (c) he accepts a form of determinism. In other words, Leibniz endorses what we can describe as an agent-causal compatibilist theory of freedom. The three theses may seem to be in tension not only because proponents of agent causation views are typically incompatibilists, but also because determinism is often defined in a way that presupposes event causation. As we will see soon, however, the tension is merely apparent. Leibniz’s version of agent-causal compatibilism is perfectly coherent and has some unique advantages over rival accounts.

This book presents a comprehensive examination of Gottfried Leibniz's views on the nature of agents and their actions. Julia Jorati offers a fresh look at controversial topics including Leibniz's doctrines of teleology, the causation of spontaneous changes within substances, divine concurrence, freedom, and contingency, and also discusses widely neglected issues such as his theories of moral responsibility, control, attributability, and compulsion. Rather than focusing exclusively on human agency, she explores the activities of non-rational substances and the differences between distinctive types of actions, showing how the will, appetitions, and teleology are key to Leibniz's discussions of agency. Her book reveals that Leibniz has a nuanced and compelling philosophy of action which has relevance for present-day discussions of agency. It will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern philosophy as well as to metaphysicians and philosophers of action.

Leibniz holds that creatures require divine concurrence for all their actions, and that this concurrence is 'special,' that is, directed at the particular qualities of each action. This gives rise to two potential problems. The first is the problem of explaining why special concurrence does not make God a co-author of creaturely actions. Second, divine concurrence may seem incompatible with the central Leibnizian doctrine that substances must act spontaneously, or independently of other substances. Concurrence, in other words, may appear to jeopardize creaturely substancehood. I argue that Leibniz can solve both of these problems by invoking final and formal causation. The creature is the sole author of its actions because it alone contributes the formal and final cause to these actions. Similarly, because it contributes the formal and final cause, the creature possesses what I call explanatory spontaneity. Leibniz, I contend, considers this type of spontaneity sufficient for substancehood

Moral rationalists and sentimentalists traditionally disagree on at least two counts, namely regarding the source of moral knowledge or moral judgements and regarding the source of moral motivation. I will argue that even though Leibniz's moral epistemology is very much in line with that of mainstream moral rationalists, his account of moral motivation is better characterized as sentimentalist. Just like Hume, Leibniz denies that there is a necessary connection between knowing that something is right and the motivation to act accordingly. Instead, he believes that certain affections are necessary for moral motivation. On my interpretation, then, Leibniz is an externalist about judgements and motivation: he is committed to a gap between the judgement that something is morally right and the motivation to act accordingly. As a matter of fact, I will argue that there are two gaps. The first and less controversial one has to do with the fact that Leibniz reconciles his psychological egoism with ethical altruis..

it is one of the central commitments of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics that all substances or monads possess perfect spontaneity, that is, that all states of a given monad originate within it.1 Created monads do not truly interact with each other, for Leibniz. Instead, each one produces all of its states single-handedly, requiring only God’s ordinary concurrence. Several commentators have pointed out that implicit in Leibniz’s view is a distinction between different types of spontaneity: a general type of spontaneity that all monads have perfectly and at all times, and a narrower type of spontaneity that monads possess in only some of their actions. Some commentators make a similar case for two types of teleology:..