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63Leibniz on Concurrence, Spontaneity, and AuthorshipModern Schoolman 88 (3/4): 267-297. 2011.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 substanc…Read more
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56Gottfried Leibniz: Philosophy of MindInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a true polymath: he made substantial contributions to a host of different fields. Within the philosophy of mind, his chief innovations include his rejection of the Cartesian doctrines that all mental states are conscious and that non-human animals lack souls as well as sensation.
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95Leibniz's Twofold Gap Between Moral Knowledge and MotivationBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (4): 748-766. 2014.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 …Read more
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104Three Types of Spontaneity and Teleology in LeibnizJournal of the History of Philosophy 53 (4): 669-698. 2015.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…Read more
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105Leibniz on Causation – Part 1Philosophy Compass 10 (6): 389-397. 2015.Leibniz holds that created substances do not causally interact with each other but that there is causal activity within each such creature. Every created substance constantly changes internally, and each of these changes is caused by the substance itself or by its prior states. Leibniz describes this kind of intra-substance causation both in terms of final causation and in terms of efficient causation. How exactly this works, however, is highly controversial. I will identify what I take to be th…Read more
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119Monadic Teleology without Goodness and without GodThe Leibniz Review 23 43-72. 2013.Most interpreters think that for Leibniz, teleology is goodness-directedness. Explaining a monadic action teleologically, according to them, simply means explaining it in terms of the goodness of the state at which the agent aims. On some interpretations, the goodness at issue is always apparent goodness: an action is end-directed iff it aims at what appears good to the agent. On other interpretations, the goodness at issue is only sometimes apparent goodness and at other times merely objecti…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz |
Leibniz: Metaphysics |
Leibniz: Philosophy of Action |