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32Leibniz's Naturalized Philosophy of Mind by Larry M. JorgensenJournal of the History of Philosophy 59 (4): 684-686. 2021.Larry Jorgensen aims to show that "Leibniz offers a fully natural theory of mind", recommending Leibniz to our contemporary discussion of naturalism. Readers of Leibniz will, however, hesitate to call him a naturalist. After all, he considered natural laws to be subordinated rules below general divine laws and rejected explaining the soul's action by bodily motion. Jorgensen does have a point, though, when he refers to Leibniz's frequent pleas for natural explanations and his continuity principl…Read more
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12Did Moses Mendelssohn Lack Historical Thinking?: A Critique of a Common PrejudiceDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 68 (4): 564-589. 2020.There is widespread agreement in scholarship that Moses Mendelssohn lacked historical thinking, an opinion accepted even among Mendelssohn experts. This misjudgment is based on a remark in his Jerusalem against Lessing’s Education of Humankind and surely ignores Mendelssohn’s historical work. I will question the misjudgment by a detour: first, I will ask for whom Lessing wrote his Education of Humankind. Then I will turn to the usually celebrated origin of historical thinking in Semler and Herde…Read more
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23(English translation of) “Contexte génétique et première réception de la Monadologie. Leibniz, Wolff et la Doctrine de L’harmonie préétablie,”The Leibniz Review 29 185-199. 2019.The many equivocations that, in several respects, characterised the reception of Leibniz's Principes de la Nature et de la Grâce and Monadologie, up until the last century, find their origins in the genetic circumstances of their manuscripts, which gave rise to misinformation published in an anonymous review that appeared in the Leipzig Acta eruditorum in 1721. Archival research demonstrates that the author of this review, as well as of the Latin review of the Monadologie, which appeared, the sa…Read more
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Transubstantiation, physics and philosophy at the Time of the Catholic DemonstrationsIn Stuart Brown (ed.), The Young Leibniz and His Philosophy, Kluwer. 1999.
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28Spinoza’s parrot, Socinian Syllogisms, and Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Leibniz’s Three Strategies of Defending Christian MysteriesAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (4): 551-574. 2002.This paper intends to show the connection between the theological, logical and epistemological ideas in Leibniz’s thinking. The paper will focus on the reasons for Leibniz’s fundamental decision to defend the Christian mysteries and his three different strategies for doing so. Each of these strategies is an answer to a particular challenge: to the Socinian who claims that the mysteries are contradictory; to the mechanical philosophy which denies the possibility of the mysteries, and to Spinoza’s…Read more
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Why Leibniz Was Not an Eclectic Philosopher?In Wenchao Li (ed.), Für Unser Glück oder das Glück Anderer: Vortrage des X. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, vol. 5, Olms. pp. 153-174. 2016.
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Die Berliner Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend (Lessing) und ihre Kritik des Kopenhagener KlopstockkreisesBerliner Aufklärung 6 11-31. 2017.
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“Die Zweisprachigkeit der deutschen öffentlichen Debatte über den Jugement de L’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres sur une Lettre prétendue de M. de Leibnitz gegen Samuel König 1752-53In Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer (ed.), Gallotropismus und Zivilisationsmodelle im deutschsprachigen Raum (1660–1789)/Gallotropisme et modèles civilisationnels dans l`espace germanophone (1660–1789) / Band 3: Gallotropismus aus helvetischer Sicht/Le gallotropisme dans une perspective helvétique, Winter. pp. 321-347. 2017.
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The Necessitarian Threat of the Mathematizing of NatureMinnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Special Issue): 274-307. 2017.
Areas of Interest
History of Western Philosophy |