Donald Rutherford

The revival of Leibniz studies in the past twenty-five years has cast important new light on both the context and content of Leibniz's philosophical thought. Where earlier English-language scholarship understood Leibniz's philosophy as issuing from his preoccupations with logic and language, recent work has recommended an account on which theological, ethical, and metaphysical themes figure centrally in Leibniz's thought throughout his career. The significance of these themes to the development of Leibniz's philosophy is the subject of increasing attention by philosophers and historians. This collection of new essays by a distinguished group of scholars offers an up-to-date overview of the current state of Leibniz research. In focusing on nature and freedom, the volume revisits two key topics in Leibniz's thought, on which he engaged both contemporary and historical arguments. Important contributions to Leibniz scholarship in their own right, these articles collectively provide readers a framework in which to better situate Leibniz's distinctive philosophy of nature and the congenial home for a morally significant freedom that he took it to provide.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature is intended to offer a broad panorama on Leibniz’s philosophy. Although necessarily selective in its focus, it aspires to a comprehensive understanding of how the different parts of Leibniz’s philosophy — theodicy, ethics, metaphysics, natural philosophy — fit together in a coherent and compelling fashion. In the book, I indicate some of the places where tensions threaten the unity of this scheme. My primary goal, however, is to reconstruct a system that would be recognizable to Leibniz himself. Within this system, primacy is assigned to the doctrine of theodicy. Although many topics vied for Leibniz’s philosophical attention, none was more firmly embedded in his consciousness than the problem of comprehending the existence and nature of the world in a way consistent with its creation by a supremely wise and good God. One of the central theses of the book is that it is only against the background of this project that we can properly understand the details of Leibniz’s complex metaphysics.

This volume is a critical edition of the ten-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of Europe’s most influential early modern thinkers, and Bartholomew Des Bosses, a Jesuit theologian who was keen to bring together Leibniz’s philosophy and the Aristotelian philosophy and religious doctrines accepted by his order. The letters offer crucial insights into Leibniz’s final metaphysics and into the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford present seventy-one of Leibniz’s and Des Bosses’s letters in the original Latin and in careful English translation. Few of the letters have been translated into English before. The editors also provide extensive annotations, deletions, and marginalia from Leibniz’s various drafts, and a substantial introduction setting the context for the correspondence and analyzing the main philosophical issues.

The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy is a comprehensive introduction to the central topics and changing shape of philosophical inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores one of the most innovative periods in the history of Western philosophy, extending from Montaigne, Bacon and Descartes through Hume and Kant. During this period, philosophers initiated and responded to major intellectual developments in natural science, religion, and politics, transforming in the process concepts and doctrines inherited from ancient and medieval philosophy. In this Companion, leading specialists examine early modern treatments of the methodological and conceptual foundations of natural science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, logic and language, moral and political philosophy, and theology. A final chapter looks forward to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This will be an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the philosophical thought of the early modern period.

Abstract Nietzsche defends an ideal of freedom as the achievement of a ?higher human being?, whose value judgments are a product of a rigorous scrutiny of inherited values and an expression of how the answers to ultimate questions of value are ?settled in him?. I argue that Nietzsche's view is a recognizable descendent of ideas advanced by the ancient Stoics and Spinoza, for whom there is no contradiction between the realization of freedom and the affirmation of fate, and who restrict this freedom to rare individuals, who escape the bondage of conventional mores and passive emotional states. Although Nietzsche rejects key assumptions made by both the Stoics and Spinoza, his outlook is an extension of their efforts to elaborate the notion of freedom as an ideal

Leibniz was introduced to the English-speaking world in the twentieth century by Bertrand Russell’s Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, a book that at once hailed the depth and elegance of Leibniz’s logico-metaphysical scheme and scorned his ethical theory. In the intervening years, Russell’s book has stimulated a large body of commentary, which has led to a sophisticated understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Leibniz’s metaphysics. Predictably, Leibniz’s practical philosophy has received much less attention. With the exception of John Hostler’s Leibniz’s Moral Philosophy, there has been no book-length treatment of Leibniz’s ethics in English and only a handful of articles. In this respect, English-language scholarship has lagged behind that of the Continent, where beginning with Gaston Grua’s landmark Jurisprudence universelle et Théodicée selon Leibniz there has grown a rich body of literature that has explored in detail the character of Leibniz’s practical philosophy and its relation to the history of moral and political thought.

A number of recent authors have raised the question of Leibniz’s commitment, during the 1680s and after, to the reality of corporeal substances. In contrast to the standard reading of him as embracing early on a view of substance which is in all essential respects that of the “Monadology”, it has been argued that Leibniz is in fact inclined to recognize two distinct types of substance: on the one hand, unextended soul-like substances ; on the other hand, quasi-Aristotelian corporeal substances. Some commentators have seen Leibniz as deciding definitively by the late 1690s in favor of the monadic theory. Others, however, have argued for a more complicated reading of his development, seeing Leibniz as struggling with the problem of corporeal substance for much of his career.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 591-592 [Access article in PDF] J. A. Cover and John O'Leary-Hawthorne. Substance & Individuation in Leibniz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 307. Cloth, $59.95. This close engagement with Leibniz's modal metaphysics is as rewarding as it is challenging. Crisply written and tightly argued, the book aims to achieve a balance between what the authors describe as their historical objective—to ascertain Leibniz's views on individuation against the backdrop of scholastic philosophy—and their philosophical goal—to investigate the issue of individuation more generally by construing Leibniz as a mediary between scholastic and modern metaphysics (4). The result is an original, if at times contentious, reinterpretation of some of the central tenets of Leibniz's philosophy.Since a full discussion of the work is beyond the scope of this review, we focus on one principal line of argument that supports much of what the authors say about Leibniz. Although in early texts Leibniz occasionally shows sympathy for a relational view of individuation (59-63), his dominant position (developed in the seminal Disputatio metaphysica) is that a substance's principle of individuation is wholly internal to it. For the authors, this becomes a benchmark for the interpretation of Leibniz's later philosophy. On their reading, Leibniz's account of individuation rests on two main theses: "the requirement of separability" (that the existence of any substance is metaphysically independent of that of any other substance except God) and "the requirement that whatever individuates a substance must be wholly internal to it" (87).These theses are heavy with consequences. Concerning the ontological status of relations and relational properties (or extrinsic denominations) the authors convincingly argue that Leibniz embraces a reductionist position, according to which relational properties supervene on a substance's intrinsic accidents, i.e., its perceptions and appetitions. Monadic facts about substances suffice to determine all relational facts, and the latter cannot change without a change in the former (though the converse does not hold). Emphasizing Leibniz's statement that God sees in a complete concept the "foundations" of all that can be predicated of a substance, the authors add to this the more controversial claim that extrinsic denominations are not included in the complete concept of an individual substance (83-4). Thus, the identity of any substance is defined by the totality of its intrinsic denominations, and these in turn determine the relations that hold among substances.The centerpiece of the book addresses the modal dimension of Leibniz's theory of individuation. Here the authors argue that Leibniz adheres to what they call "strong essentialism" rather than "superessentialism." The former, like the latter, holds that a substance could not have a complete concept different than the one it has. However, as a "strong essentialist" Leibniz denies that all of a substance's properties are essential to it. Based on their reading of Leibniz's doctrine of relations, the authors maintain that all and only intrinsic denominations are essential to a substance. From this they infer that Leibniz allows for the transworld identity of substances: the same substance can exist in different possible worlds, worlds distinguished by the fact that they contain different constituent substances. This is possible, according to the authors, because the "laws of harmony" impose no constraint on which substances can coexist in a world. A possible world is defined by the collection of individuals supposed to exist in it, and laws [End Page 591] of harmony are merely relational truths supervening on those substances' intrinsic accidents (109).The authors are candid in admitting that their interpretation cannot be reconciled with all of Leibniz's texts. Their goal instead is to give Leibniz the best he can get, metaphysically speaking: "Our efforts here are to show that the architectonic of Leibniz's own metaphysics is properly captured by strong essentialism, that the important and deepest threads of his thinking better hang together on that construal" (103). Yet one might take issue with their view of what count as Leibniz's "deepest" thoughts. Surely it is a...

Leibniz raises three main objections to the doctrine of occasionalism: (1) it is inconsistent with the supposition of finite substances; (2) it presupposes the occurrence of "perpetual miracles"; (3) it requires that God "disturb" the ordinary laws of nature. At issue in objection (1) is the proper understanding of divine omnipotence, and of the relationship between the power of God and that of created things. I argue that objections (2) and (3), on the other hand, derive from a particular conception of the intelligibility of nature, a conception to which Leibniz is firmly committed and that occasionalists like Malebranche no less firmly reject