Christia Mercer

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:nook REVIEWS 689 if everyone behaves as if everyone is saved the result is a world in which God could appear and not be crucified. To be sure, there is a chance of an infinite life. Pascal believed human beings are potentially infinite--as is shown by our capacity for extending our knowledge to the infinite--but we are also potentially nothing, as is shown by the fact that the person never really appears in our scientific accounts. It is through God that our infinity is to be achieved, and so betting on God is also betting on ourselves in a perfectly intelligible way. This involw~s a notion of infinity not explored in any of these essays, which makes it possible to share with God without changing the divine nature (or losing ours). This sharing is a payoff which cannot be attained by.just any act. Our lives may also be endless and possessed of positive value because they are not lived in hell, but this is icing on a cake which you are supposed to eat anyhow. Still, though Pascal might have taught the authors a thing or two, he would have found this book handy for some of its new conceptual analyses and some of its classic essays. Ian Hacking's 1972 analysis of what he takes to be three different arguments in Pascal remains a good starting point and John K. Ryan's historical article of 1945 still has useful things to say about Tillotson, whose maximization-of-utility argument really was the one many commentators have taken to be Pascal's. (But Ryan misses much of the background in the combination of scepticism and fideism in Charron and La Mothe le Vayer.) Among the others Jeff Jordan does a good job on the "many gods" objections, Richard Foley's account of pragmatic grounds for belief adds some clear insights (though his account of rationality is open to some objections), and Thomas V. Morris's account of the problems of wagering and evidence will be a handy reference point. Edward F. McClennen's account of finite decision is a necessary counterpart to Sorensen's infinity paper, and Philip L. Quinn opens some of the moral issues involved in all such wagers. Finally, George Schlesinger's assessment of the subtleties of theistic argument well repays the time spent reading it. The bibliography is useful and up-to-date. The editor would probably cheerfully admit his book's shortcomings as a work in the history of philosophy, but the volume must nevertheless have a place on the bookshelf of everyone for whom these issues are central. LESI,IE ARMOUR Universityof Ottawa G. W. Leibniz. De Summa Rerum: MetaphysicalPapers, z675-76. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by G. H. R. Parkinson. The Yale Leibniz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp lxiv + 145. Cloth, $37.oo. The YaleLeib,niz, under the general editorship of Daniel Garber and Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., will provide scholarly editions of Leibniz's original texts along with an English translation on facing pages. As the general editors explain in their introduction, each volume in the series will be "a collection of texts that constitute a natural unit," each will be edited and translated by a specialist who will also contribute an introduction, and 690 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER i99 5 each will include writings most of which either have not been published or, if published, have not been translated. The first volume of The Yale Leibniz, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson, is a tantalizing beginning. In it, Parkinson has collected, translated, and introduced some of the most interesting papers from the Academy edition's Series VI, Vol. 3, first published in 198o. In this volume the Academy editors have placed under the title of De Summa Return those papers which Leibniz wrote between late 1675 and December 1676 and which treat problems in the philosophy of mathematics (especially those of the infinite) and in metaphysics and philosophical theology. The papers are enormously important. Toward the end of his Paris stay (which lasted from March, 1672 to October 4, 1676) and after a breakthrough in his work on...

In his thoughtful and generous review of my book, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, Cees Leijenhorst accepts many of its most radical conclusions: that Leibniz’s metaphysics evolved out of an attempt to combine ideas gathered from the great philosophers of the past and to do so in a manner that would solve the theological, legal, and philosophical questions that most concerned him; that although Leibniz’s notion of substance developed out of his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle, his conception of the relation between God and creatures has its roots in the Platonism that he learned as a young man in Leipzig and Jena; that the views constituting the core doctrines of the mature philosophy were conceived by the time Leibniz went to Paris in early 1672; and that Leibniz rejects the reality of passive extended matter and embraces his own version of idealism as early as 1671. I am tempted to respond with a loud rodeo yell and end it at that. But because the few points on which.

Anyone interested in Leibniz, the Kabbalah, the Cambridge Platonists, Gnosticism, Platonism, or seventeenth-century metaphysics will want to read Allison P. Coudert’s Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Coudert argues that core features of Leibniz’s mature philosophy were directly influenced by the Kabbalah in general and Francis Mercury van Helmont’s Lurianic Kabbalah in particular. This is a provocative thesis to which Coudert brings an impressive amount of scholarly detective work. Her argument in brief goes as follows: there are important differences between the philosophy of Leibniz’s middle period and that of the late; some of the most distinctive features of the late philosophy are very similar to key aspects of the Lurianic Kabbalism of van Helmont, with whose works and ideas Leibniz became increasingly familiar after 1687; therefore, Leibniz’s late philosophy was significantly influenced by the thought of van Helmont.

When Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, philosophers were still inclined to offer natural explanations in Aristotelian terms. Neither the physical proposals of Bruno himself, nor those of other prominent non-Aristotelians like Paracelsus had diminished the power of the explanatory model offered by the scholastics. For those philosophers watching the demise of Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the burning of the wood and its subsequent effects would have been explained adequately in terms of matter and substantial form. For such Aristotelian philosophers, all natural objects are constituted of matter and form, and natural events are explained in terms of the actualization of the potency of these two “principles of nature.” By the time Kenelm Digby composed his Two Treatises of 1644 and Thomas Hobbes his De Corpore in 1655, there was a new explanatory model available to explain such events, one that had greatly diminished the power of the scholastic model. According to the mechanical philosophy, nature is composed of matter—whether the res extensa of Descartes, the atoms of Gassendi, or one of the many less popular accounts of corporeity—whose actions and interactions cause and explain all the phenomena of nature. For the mechanist, therefore, all physical phenomena are to be explained in terms of some kind of matter and motion. Although these thinkers disagreed about how to define the material component in nature, they all took it to be entirely devoid of substantial forms. For our purposes here, it will be helpful to distinguish between first wave and second wave mechanists. A first wave mechanist is someone like Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, or Gassendi who proposed a version of the mechanical explanatory model before 1650. A second wave mechanist is a philosopher working in the second half of the seventeenth century who accepts the mechanical explanatory model. For our purposes, it is important that many second wave mechanists were prepared to reject the scholastic explanatory model, replace it with the mechanical one, and yet were not content to accept the metaphysical grounding of the mechanical physics offered by the first wave mechanists.

Working on Leibniz’s vast essays and texts can seem overwhelming. As exciting as it is to study the details of the Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics, the Theodicy and the letters to Arnauld, it can be terrifying to sit back and think that there are thousands of other pages of equally sublime and often more difficult philosophical material. The personal notes are particularly daunting. Because Leibniz wrote these for himself, it is often difficult to grasp his reasoning and decipher his underlying philosophical motivation: he typically neither states his most basic assumptions nor articulates how the piece he is presently writing fits into a general plan or project. Sometimes he just plays with an idea or tries out an argument. As Leibniz himself wrote about his notes: “instead of treasure..., you will only find ashes; instead of elaborate works, a few sheets of paper and some poorly expressed vestiges of hasty reflections, which were only saved for the sake of my memory.” But even Leibniz’s more polished essays can be unnerving in manuscript. These sheets—which contain deletions, additions, an enormous number of reformulations, and reconsiderations—reveal an impatient intellect hurrying to express its ideas. Because Leibniz is so often reluctant to set the stage for a philosophical proposal or to acknowledge its various implications, one often has to go well beyond the text in order to understand how the proposal at hand relates to other parts of his thought. Moreover, Leibniz encourages confusion by using one terminology in one text and an entirely different one in another. The moral to the story is clear: one cannot depend either on a single essay or on a small group of passages taken in isolation from others in the same period. When it comes to Leibniz’s writings, it is necessary to take the widest possible textual perspective.