Catherine Wilson

This is an essay review of Ted Honderich's recently published autobiography. Treating the work as both a study of philosophical and political culture in the second half of the twentieth century and as an exercise in self-evaluation, the reviewer discusses the problems of truth and explanation in narrative and the issues of professional and sexual morality raised by the narrative. Honderich's account is assessed as credible, illuminating, and well-written, even as questions are raised concerning the consistency of his political beliefs.

Moral properties are widely held to be response‐dependent properties of actions, situations, events and persons. There is controversy as to whether the putative response‐dependence of these properties nullifies any truth‐claims for moral judgements, or rather supports them. The present paper argues that moral judgements are more profitably compared with theoretical judgements in the natural sciences than with the judgements of immediate sense‐perception. The notion of moral truth is dependent on the notion of moral knowledge, which in turn is best understood as a possible endpoint of theory change for the better.

In this fascinating but sometimes baffling book, the reader engages with a series of conditionals like the following: “If [the psychiatrist] Clérimbault manifests a delirium, it is because he discovers the tiny hallucinatory perceptions of ether addicts in the folds of clothing”. “If Leibniz’s principles [of identity and sufficient reason] appear to us as cries, it is because each one signals the presence of a class of beings that are themselves crying and draw attention to themselves by these cries...”. Deleuze’s study is concerned with Leibniz and with leibnizianism; with the Baroque considered as a historical period and with the baroque considered as a persistent impulse in architecture, decoration, and in human thinking and system construction. Baroque and baroque are explorations, in his view, of curvilinearity, and Deleuze explores Leibniz’s use of mathematical analogies from topology, projective geometry and the calculus. But his attention in the book is mainly fixed on two Leibnizian images. The first image is that of the two-storied house, typically represented in baroque painting by an angelic realm in the upper half of the picture hovering above the human realm. In Leibniz’s writings, this translates into the world of matter and the world of intelligent, self-conscious spirits on the upper level. The second image is that of the fold, which appears in the pleats and draperies of Baroque costume, sculpture, and interior decoration, and which reappears in Leibniz’s mind-as-folded curtain, in his enveloped organisms, preformed under folds, and in the continuum, from whose recesses ever more numbers or particles can be pulled out. In clothing, waves, the brain, pleats of all sorts, surface disappears into interior. Deconstruction! But is it philosophy? Yes! Though Deleuze pulls his comparison-objects out of every corner of contemporary French culture, they are never arbitrary, and the book is focused clearly on its subject.

Margaret Wilson, who died last year, has been described as the most eminent English-language historian of early modern philosophy of her generation. She was President of the Leibniz Society of North America for four years, from 1986 to 1990. Within this organization she is remembered both for her contributions to Leibniz-studies and for her attention to and support of younger researchers and her governing role in the Society. Her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on “Leibniz’s Doctrine of Necessary Truth,” written under the supervision of Morton White, was completed in 1965, and she went on to write a number of papers on Leibniz in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s, including “Leibniz and Materialism,” “Confused Ideas” and “Leibniz’s Dynamics and Contingency in Nature,” returning to Leibniz in the late 1980s and early 1990s with such articles as “Compossibility and Law” and “The Phenomenalisms of Leibniz and Berkeley. ” Over the course of her career, Wilson published two books, her dissertation, which appeared in a series issued by Garland in 1990, and Descartes, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978, as well as more than thirty papers on seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, nearly all of which are included in the recent volume from Princeton University Press, Ideas and Mechanism. She held a number of research awards and honorary fellowships, including a Fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to which she was elected in 1992.

Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally.