-
16Marginalia in Russell's Copy of Gerhardt's Edition of Leibniz's Philosophische SchriftenRussell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 37 (1). 2017.Russell’s most important source for his book on Leibniz was C. I. Gerhardt’s seven-volume Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Russell heavily annotated his copy of this important edition of Leibniz’s works. The present paper records all Russell’s marginalia, with the exception of passages marked merely by vertical lines in the margin, and provides explanatory commentary.
-
15Monads, Composition, and Force: Ariadnean Threads Through Leibniz's LabyrinthOxford University Press. 2018.In this new work, Richard T. W. Arthur offers a fresh interpretation of Leibniz's theory of substance. He goes against a long trend of idealistic interpretations of Leibniz's thought by instead taking seriously Leibniz's claim of introducing monads to solve the problem of the composition of matter and motion.
-
19Moore's Notes on Leibniz LecturesRussell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 37 (1). 2017.G. E. Moore attended Russell’s lectures on Leibniz in 1899 and kept detailed notes which have been preserved among his papers. The present article prints his notes in their entirety with annotations.
-
163Leibniz’s Theory of SpaceFoundations of Science 18 (3): 499-528. 2013.In this paper I offer a fresh interpretation of Leibniz’s theory of space, in which I explain the connection of his relational theory to both his mathematical theory of analysis situs and his theory of substance. I argue that the elements of his mature theory are not bare bodies (as on a standard relationalist view) nor bare points (as on an absolutist view), but situations. Regarded as an accident of an individual body, a situation is the complex of its angles and distances to other co-existing…Read more
-
10Lo zenonismo come fonte delle monadi di Leibniz: una risposta a Paolo RossiRivista di Storia Della Filosofia 2. 2003.
-
20Leibniz on Infinite Number, Infinite Wholes, and the Whole WorldThe Leibniz Review 11 103-116. 2001.Reductio arguments are notoriously inconclusive, a fact which no doubt contributes to their great fecundity. For once a contradiction has been proved, it is open to interpretation which premise should be given up. Indeed, it is often a matter of great creativity to identify what can be consistently given up. A case in point is a traditional paradox of the infinite provided by Galileo Galilei in his Two New Sciences, which has since come to be known as Galileo’s Paradox. It concerns the set of al…Read more
-
49Massimo Mugnai and the Study of LeibnizThe Leibniz Review 23 1-5. 2013.This essay is an appreciation of Massimo Mugnai’s many contributions to Leibniz scholarship, as well as to the history of logic and history of philosophy more generally.
-
153In contrast with some recent theories of infinitesimals as non-Archimedean entities, Leibniz’s mature interpretation was fully in accord with the Archimedean Axiom: infinitesimals are fictions, whose treatment as entities incomparably smaller than finite quantities is justifiable wholly in terms of variable finite quantities that can be taken as small as desired, i.e. syncategorematically. In this paper I explain this syncategorematic interpretation, and how Leibniz used it to justify the calcul…Read more
-
87Leibniz on Infinite Number, Infinite Wholes, and the Whole WorldThe Leibniz Review 11 103-116. 2001.Reductio arguments are notoriously inconclusive, a fact which no doubt contributes to their great fecundity. For once a contradiction has been proved, it is open to interpretation which premise should be given up. Indeed, it is often a matter of great creativity to identify what can be consistently given up. A case in point is a traditional paradox of the infinite provided by Galileo Galilei in his Two New Sciences, which has since come to be known as Galileo’s Paradox. It concerns the set of al…Read more
-
48Leibniz’s Causal Theory of Time RevisitedThe Leibniz Review 26 151-178. 2016.Following the lead of Hans Reichenbach in the early twentieth century, many authors have attributed a causal theory of time to Leibniz. My exposition of Leibniz’s theory of time in a paper of 1985 has been interpreted as a version of such a causal theory, even though I was critical of the idea that Leibniz would have tried to reduce relations among monadic states to causal relations holding only among phenomena. Since that time previously unpublished texts by Leibniz have become available in whi…Read more
-
70Leibniz on ContinuityPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986. 1986.In this paper I attempt to throw new light on Leibniz's apparently conflicting remarks concerning the continuity of matter. He says that matter is "discrete" yet "actually divided to infinity" and (thus dense), and moreover that it fills (continuous) space. I defend Leibniz from the charge of inconsistency by examining the historical development of his views on continuity in their physical and mathematical context, and also by pointing up the striking similarities of his construal of continuity …Read more
-
61Leibniz: Body, Substance, MonadBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (4): 721-724. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
-
39Leibniz’s Mechanical Principles : Commentary and TranslationThe Leibniz Review 23 101-105. 2013.
-
71In a recent note in this review (Leibniz e gli Zenonisti, n. 3, 2001, pp. 15-22) Paolo Rossi stresses the importance of a philosophical sect that he claims has been unjustly ignored in accounts of the history of modern philosophy, the Jesuit philosophers of Louvain and Spain of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century known as the Zenonists. The occasion for his complaint is Massimo Mugnai’s admirable new introduction to Leibniz’s thought (Introduzione alla filosofia di Leibniz, Torino, …Read more
-
17LeibnizPolity. 2014.Few philosophers have left a legacy like that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He has been credited not only with inventing the differential calculus, but also with anticipating the basic ideas of modern logic, information science, and fractal geometry. He made important contributions to such diverse fields as jurisprudence, geology and etymology, while sketching designs for calculating machines, wind pumps, and submarines. But the common presentation of his philosophy as a kind of unworldly ideali…Read more
-
159I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author. Thus I believe that there is no part of matter which is not, I do not say divisible, but actually divided; and consequently the least particle ought to be considered as a world full of an infinity of different creatures.
-
48Continuous creation, continuous time: A refutation of the alleged discontinuity of cartesian timeJournal of the History of Philosophy 26 (3): 349-375. 1988.
-
20Klaas van Berkel. Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. viii+265. $35.96 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 4 (1): 192-196. 2014.
-
67Cohesion, Division and Harmony: Physical Aspects of Leibniz’s Continuum ProblemPerspectives on Science 6 (1): 110-135. 1998.
-
44Geoffrey Hellman* and Stewart Shapiro.**Varieties of Continua—From Regions to Points and BackPhilosophia Mathematica 27 (1): 148-152. 2019.HellmanGeoffrey* * and ShapiroStewart.** ** Varieties of Continua—From Regions to Points and Back. Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-19-871274-9. Pp. x + 208.
-
33Beeckman's Discrete Moments and Descartes' DisdainIntellectual History Review 22 (1): 69-90. 2012.Descartes' allusions, in the Meditations and the Principles, to the individual moments of duration, has for some years stirred controversy over whether this commits him to a kind of time atomism. The origins of Descartes' way of treating moments as least intervals of duration can be traced back to his early collaboration with Isaac Beeckman. Where Beeckman (in 1618) conceived of moments as (mathematically divisible) physical indivisibles, corresponding to the durations of uniform motions between…Read more
-
17Exacting a Philosophy of Becoming From Modern PhysicsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 63 (2): 101-110. 1982.
-
117Animal generation and substance in sennert and LeibnizIn Justin E. H. Smith (ed.), The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 2006.Gottfried Leibniz is well known for his claim to have “rehabilitated” the substantial forms of scholastic philosophy, forging a reconciliation of the New Philosophy of Descartes, Mersenne and Gassendi with Aristotelian metaphysics (in his so-called Discourse on Metaphysics, 1686). Much less celebrated is the fact that fifty years earlier (in his Hypomnemata Physica, 1636) the Bratislavan physician and natural philosopher Daniel Sennert had already argued for the indispensability to atomism of (s…Read more
-
69In this paper I attempt to trace the development of Gottfried Leibniz’s early thought on the status of the actually infinitely small in relation to the continuum. I argue that before he arrived at his mature interpretation of infinitesimals as fictions, he had advocated their existence as actually existing entities in the continuum. From among his early attempts on the continuum problem I distinguish four distinct phases in his interpretation of infinitesimals: (i) (1669) the continuum consists …Read more
-
73Infinite Number and the World Soul; in Defence of Carlin and LeibnizThe Leibniz Review 9 105-116. 1999.In last year’s Review Gregory Brown took issue with Laurence Carlin’s interpretation of Leibniz’s argument as to why there could be no world soul. Carlin’s contention, in Brown’s words, is that Leibniz denies a soul to the world but not to bodies on the grounds that “while both the world and [an] aggregate of limited spatial extent are infinite in multitude, the former, but not the latter, is infinite in respect of magnitude and hence cannot be considered a whole”. Brown casts doubt on this inte…Read more