Catherine Wilson

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.

A collection of essays covering a range of topics related to Leibniz. The monads and the pre-established harmony make numerous appearances, and so do Leibniz's discussions of causality, relations, individuation, nature, freedom, consciousness, and divinity. In addition to sections on Leibniz's physics and his theory of substance, a number of papers are included on his philosophy of mind that draw heavily on the New Essays, along with several articles on metaphysical and theological issues, and a section on Leibniz's relationships with his contemporaries and predecessors.

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.